What does white supremacy even look like? bell hooks, CRT, and Education
What Black feminism offers us all as we bravely prepare to enter the holidaze.
In this post: What Black feminism offers us all as we bravely prepare to enter the holidaze.
Last week: How Nice White Ladies and the politics of being basic turned Virginia red.
Next week: On reclaiming your narrative and identity from the hands of crusty-ass Generic White Men.
Dear friends and fam,
Last week, like most of us I suspect, I did too much work. So this week’s post is short and sweet because damn November came on hard like that. On the higher ed activism side of things, I spoke with Chris Harjerink and Rebecca Shields, a contributing editor to Post-PhD, about the need for subversive intellectuals to gather and plot the revolution. You can watch the video of our fireside chat, “Towards the Undercommons: The Role of the Subversive Intellectual Today.”
I also released an interview with Jessie Daniels, whose book Nice White Ladies I hope y’all have gone bought already. To start the interview off, we talked about our own projects of making white supremacy visible and real to other white folks. In addition to very much modeling myself after Jessie Daniel’s brand of public intellectual, I was inspired to hear her words about the stress of striking out “against” your own kind. In both our cases, I’m talking about white people (you can watch the full interview here). In the interview, Jessie described just how lonely a road it can be. And the ways in which she found community, spirituality, and joy through her racial activism.
In honor of the holidays coming up, a subject which is already a cause for stress amongst the queers and weirdos I call my chosen family, I thought I’d explore the idea of what it means to resist white supremacy in yourself and in your family. For better or worse, I’ve chosen the loud, noisy route. While this has caused a few retracted invitations to come over, I’ve noticed that, really, my life, my community, and my values remain unaffected. I think this is because I see what Black feminism offers to all of us.
Black feminism is clear on this subject of how to resist and call out white supremacy. But what is less clear, at least perhaps for white folks, is what the f to do with this information in regards to subtly and continually speaking out (against) casual and overt racism.
The best place to start with Black feminism is how they discuss whiteness. For example, this essay, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” by bell hooks is one of my favorites, since of course, it centers on the classroom experience.
Black feminism and postcolonial theory informed my approach to writing about education, and it is through these revelatory discourses that I found not just understanding, but a path towards a different way of being, or of existing in this world.
As bell hooks say, “Systems of domination, imperialism, colonialism, and racism actively coerce black folks to internalize negative perceptions of blackness, to be self-hating” (the same can be said of gender and sexuality, hence intersectionality).
And then she speaks of the classroom, and teaching, where heated debates take place between white and black students. Without saying so, hooks implicitly remind us that this is progress, this is the discourse, and this is why white people are so “terrified” of CRT. Because CRT is part of the process of making visible racism and white supremacy.
As hooks remarks, “Usually, white students respond with naive amazement that black people critically assess white people from a standpoint that “whiteness” is the privileged signifier.” This also happens when people assume a default straight male viewpoint as the “universal” and “objective” one.
Defensiveness, especially of whiteness amongst white people, is the single biggest threat to racial equity. It triggers a denial, empowered by a deep shame. This guilt, ironically or unironically, ends up confirming the status quo, and thereby prevents change.
As hooks says of white students hearing about a Black perspective of whiteness: “Their amazement that black people can watch white people with a critical “ethnographic” gaze, is itself an expression of racism. Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear.”
This idea, of sameness, making racism disappear, of being colorblind, or being pro “all lives,” is itself both a symptom and a concretization of systemic racism. As hooks continues:
“ [white students/people] have a deep emotional investment in the myth of “sameness,” even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think. Many of them are shocked that black people think critically about whiteness because racist thinking perpetuates the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated, who is subhuman, lacks the ability to comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful. Even though the majority of these students politically consider themselves liberals and anti-racist, they too unwittingly invest in the sense of whiteness as a mystery.”
What that meant for me, was a steady life-long process of unlearning white supremacy, my relationship to my white guilt and shame, and fighting for other cultural and racial realities to be taught in lieu of the entirely all-male white pantheon of intellectuals we all must kneel down to at least once in our careers if we are in the humanities. But nearly every single other field is just as bad. Medicine is formed for the white male body just as much as the humanities is about the life of the mind of white males. The list goes on and on.
Stay strong out there y’all,
A
What I’m reading on Black feminism and critiques of whiteness:
Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism and Tressie McMillam Cottom’s Thick
These are my favorite two at the moment, as the writing dazzles, and language is clear and nuanced, and beyond being on top their writing game, they have invaluable perspectives all us whites can learn just how awesome Blackness and Black feminism is!
Similar Posts about Anti-Racism & Melanin Deficiency:
NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram