Leonard Harris, in his “Insurrectionist Ethics: Advocacy, Moral Psychology, and Pragmatism” chastises pragmatism for being ethically suspect insofar as it seems to lack the necessary conceptual and motivational resources to justify deliberate and direct moral condemnation of slavery. Ultimately, Harris’s broader view, as described by Jacoby Carter, is that “an insurrectionist ethics is a philosophy aimed at radical social transformation and human liberation.”1 Two claims constitute Harris’s position. Harris writes, “a philosophy that offers moral intuitions, reasoning strategies, motivations, and examples of just moral actions but falls short of requiring that we have a moral duty to support or engage in slave insurrections is defective.”2 Ideal moral theory is not enough for Harris; rather, an acceptable moral theory would have to be nonideal insofar as it directly advocates aggressive support for the moral transformation of the world. In short, a plausible moral theory must be committed to liberation. Indeed, advocacy, according to Harris, is the hallmark of a worthwhile moral theory. Moral theory without advocacy closely resembles empty rhetoric. Second, Harris states, “a philosophy that does not make advocacy—that is, representing, defending, or promoting morally just causes— a seminal, meritorious feature of moral agency is defective.” 3 And in another context, he writes that “insurrectionists envision a world overcoming … bounded local identities, categories, and kinds…. In this sense, it is arguable that insurrectionists may very well stand against block universes, absolutes, arid abstractions, and stable categories.” 4 

Although Harris considers pragmatism as failing on both accounts mentioned above, it seems that his demand for an insurrectionist ethics has been answered by George Yancy in his Backlash.5 In this brief essay I interpret Yancy as an insurrectionist ethical thinker. Yancy presents a more radical rethinking of ethics than does Harris. Unlike Harris, Yancy does not focus specifically on pragmatism but more broadly on liberalism/philosophical modernism as the main culprit blocking the possibility of an insurrectionist ethics.

I connect Yancy with insurrectionist ethics through his critique of liberalism and its commitment to abstract individualism. This aspect of Yancy’s thinking is important precisely because of his criticism of the sutured white self. And his critique of liberalism and the sutured white self, a liberal self, is also closely related to his conception of an ethics without edges, a conception of things that emphasizes relationality. Hence, Yancy’s focus on an ethics without edges functions as a teleological suspension of liberalism in order thereby to recapture the importance of the relationality of the self. It is on the basis of the notion of the rationality of the self that Yancy’s relational ethics can best be considered as insurrectionist. In this context, the thrust of an insurrectionist ethics is to unsettle white supremacy/sutured whiteness. A self-contained agent, totally separated from the other, cannot substantively engage with the other in order to provoke response and dialogue.

In order to adequately capture the philosophical crux of Backlash, we must correctly identify some of the theoretical currents that so inform it. My claim is that his notion of an ethics without edges is one such current and that it is this current that connects Yancy’s thinking with insurrectionist ethics.

Yancy and Liberalism

Although liberalism reigns triumphantly, there is also the realization that liberalism is quickly becoming irreversibly ineffective in providing an analytical framework for critically confronting the persistence of structural/institutional racism. Yancy seeks to awaken us from the dogmatic slumber induced by liberalism, particularly its social ontology, which is none other than an uncritical infatuation with atomistic individualism. He remains convinced that the liberal notion of individualism, even as it works to the benefit of whites, entails dangerous consequences for Blacks; the lived reality of Black existence is not amenable to the asocial notion of liberal individualism. Consistent with this line of thinking, liberalism is unable to accommodate the very notion of an insurrectionist ethics. As Yancy states:

Perhaps if we live our lives as ‘presocial’ individuals, atomistic, self-interested and entrepreneurial, we will become legible. Under those terms, though, I would be in a precarious and dangerous position of having denied social reality. I would have denied the deep and enduring reality of white American racism. That charade will collapse once I’m pulled over by a white police officer and I’m asked to show my driver’s license. Then, suddenly, there is the sound of gunshots, bullets rip through my Black body, leaving me dead, and with my last breath, while looking into the white police officer’s eyes, I speak:‘ And I thought that I was like you—just an individual’ (90–91).

The liberal notion of individuals as unencumbered is too thin a conception of sociality, too inadequate a conception of social ontology to sustain a sober notion of insurrectionist ethics on behalf of subordinated groups variously viewed as “ontological entities.” Here I pursue a brief digression in order to consider Yancy’s critical working through of whiteness.

For Yancy, to deconstruct the white self is, from one perspective, a dismantling of the liberal white self. In order to pursue a deconstruction of the white self, Yancy introduces clusters of metaphors. However, these metaphors expose the unsatisfactory conception of the liberal self, and by extension the white liberal self. Yancy chooses the metaphor of suturing to capture the condition of the white self, a condition that restricts the capability of the white self to confront its racism. He writes:

I have come to use the concept of suturing within the context of understanding the structure and being of whiteness. As I see it, suturing is the process whereby white people engage in forms of closure, forms of protection from various challenges to the ways in which whiteness is seen as the norm, its unrememberable everydayness, its value assumptions, and the many ways in which it’s guilty about producing distorted knowledge about itself (105).

The sutured white self is a self that seeks normative purity. As a sutured self, closed off into itself, this white sutured self also desires normative suturing, meaning total separation from any alien affections. The sutured white self opposes the introduction of alien values and norms within its sterile normative purity. Consequently the sutured white self desires, among other things, to feed upon its own normative reserves. Obviously, the white self is not an insurrectionist self. An insurrectionist ethics, an ethics committed to human liberation, would demand an unsuturing of the white self.

Yancy on Ethics without Edges, or Ethics beyond Liberalism

In order to explicate the kind of ethics associated with the conception of the suturing of whiteness, Yancy introduces the metaphor of edges. A sutured white self has sharp edges, precisely because it is a self that is self-contained, autonomous, and transparent. But Yancy again fears that this notion of the white self as possessing edges, whiteness as sharply separated from the nonwhite others, undermines the conditions necessary for connectivity, relationality and insurrectionist activity. To be more specific, there is no possibility for insurrectionist activity, meaning the radical transformation of the world with regard to the elimination of racism. Accordingly, Yancy writes:

whiteness functions as an edge. [W]hite segregation, white redlining, white neighborhood covenants, and white gated communities function as acts of building of edges, limits, boundaries, borders, perimeters (111).

Yancy wants whites to abandon the ethics of edges and embrace an ethics without edges—to become insurrectionists. His project directly confronts the “ethical frigidity” of a sutured white self, a self seemingly unable to ethically embrace Blacks on the basis of love. Dethroning the liberal white self and the transparent white self, Yancy declares that, instead of sharp edges and sharp boundaries, there are vague and porous boundaries. Selves merge into or blend into other selves with no clear separation between them. Sociality is not a whole composed of an arbitrary collection of discrete selves. Rather, sociality is a network of subjects connected through clusters of entangled relationships. Hence, Yancy explains:

To say that white embodiment has no edges introduces what I’m calling an ontology (or being) and an ethics of no edges. In other words, an ethics of no edges and a radical rethinking of a relational ontology, where the white body does not terminate at some fictive corporeal edge, ought to encourage a different response from white people. The connection, the touching, after all, is already there (111).

Yancy contends that an ethics appropriate to releasing the white self from its harmful fables of autonomy and sincere introspection is an ethics without edges or an insurrectionist ethics. Furthermore, an ethics without edges would realistically position the white self to endure the critical process of confronting and dismantling white supremacy. According to Yancy:

An ethics of no edges that I have in mind rethinks or, better, lays bare a dynamic ontology of connectedness, a dynamic racialized somatic network. . . that problematizes a clear-cut outside limit, and thereby calls for a robust sense of ethical responsibility, indeed, white responsibility (111).

Even more importantly, an ethics without edges would undermine efforts to think white existence as somehow parallel to Black existence without any possibility of border crossings or insurrectionist activity. Yancy addresses whites as follows:

My point here is to encourage you, white reader, to engage critically how you are always already constituted relationally and socially and that you are politically preconfigured in the lives of Black people and people of color, especially in ways that perpetuate white racist oppression (111).

If an ethics without edges is to take root among whites, Yancy argues, whites must unsuture themselves. This unsuturing or insurrection against the white self, however, is not going to be easy; it will be a very painful undertaking. In the most general sense, Yancy maintains that unsuturing “brings to mind a state of pain, ‘open flesh,’ ‘exposure.’ Un-suturing suggests processes of troubling a problematic ontology or mode of being. Un-suturing can function, within this case, as a way of undergoing a radical rethinking of the body as a site of profound vulnerability, and a radical way of being-in-the-world” (112).

Unlike the capacity of suturing to facilitate fables of closure, autonomy, and sharp edges, unsuturing cultivates chaos, the unraveling of self, the collapsing of world, and the loss of narrative intelligibility. Ultimately, Yancy hopes that whites, in virtue of becoming unsutured and unstitched, will surrender their white innocence. In short, unsuturing can induce a traumatic epistemological crisis that assaults the grounds of one’s being. For these and other reasons, Yancy endorses unsuturing, confidently claiming that it has the potential to enable the white self to pursue a comprehensive shedding of its old self (113–14).

To briefly conclude, I find great analytical parallel between Yancy’s ethics without edges and Harris’ conception of insurrectionist ethics. The very notion of unsuturing the white self is consistent with an insurrectionist ethics that similarly recommends an unsuturing of an anti-Black world for the sake of white and Black liberation.

“America, you need a miracle / Beyond spiritual / I need a realer view / I hold a mirror to it”

–Pusha T, “Sunshine” from King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude

I recently had the honor of conducting an interview with George Yancy about his most recent text, Backlash. I took this opportunity to ask him about his Socratic call to think of philosophy as a vocation. To think of philosophy as a vocation requires the recognition of vulnerability, risk, embodiment, and social positioning. The reasoning, I think, is as follows: for Yancy, philosophy as a vocation is a practice, and thus requires a kind of striving. One necessary condition of this striving is understanding that we are not as good as we could be—we want to strive to be better and to make the world a better place. But this striving also requires recognizing that we do not have unfettered access to the truth, that we are always already existing from an embodied and social position. This, in turn, requires a kind of vulnerability to being wrong and a willingness to risk the surety that we have with ourselves. In our interview, he told me the following:

I reject forms of philosophical practice that attempt to detach themselves from history. I understand philosophy as a vocation. For me, it is a calling to speak along with the downtrodden and to speak out for the least of these. I also support meta-philosophical assumptions that reject forms of philosophical practice that embark upon their points of inquiry as if from nowhere.1

That a great deal of Western philosophers “embark upon their points of inquiry as if from nowhere” is a problem, for both philosophy as a discipline and for how we teach philosophy in the classroom.2 If philosophy is merely the pursuit of abstract truth, then we will only teach our students how to be right—what matters is the final attaining of that same truth. We profess to teach critical thinking—but more often than not, this takes the form of a toolbox of skills to assist in “bullshit detection.” That is, we show students how to detect what is wrong with arguments, so that they can be right. And we treat this analysis as a kind of “view from nowhere.” But do we show them that we are always arguing from an embodied and social position? Do we teach them that we do not have unfettered access to the “truth?” In other words, do we teach them how to be wrong? Do we teach them to accept and value critique? To risk the sense of their surety in their positions? To take a long hard look at their lives? To be unhappy with their current state, and to desire to be better?

If we do not, then our students are not prepared to understand (much less accept) their role in the propagation of suffering, and consequently what must be done to end it. In Backlash, Yancy writes that “Had ‘Dear White America’ been read in the spirit of what I’m referring to as a risk, a kind of death, much of what was misunderstood about my letter may have been avoided” (Yancy, 58). What is our role, as teachers of critical thinking, in the inability of white Americans to risk themselves, to accept gifts such as the one Yancy gives us in his work? Do we teach our students that being good and being happy are not the same, and that truth can “hurt, stun, unsettle, and unnerve” (3)? Do we ready them for the moment when they must see themselves in “a most disagreeable mirror?” (55). That is, do we prepare them (and ourselves) to learn the truth about racism, sexism, oppression, and our roles in it? Do we help open them to the possibility for “constructive transformation, something that is often painful?” (55). If we think that philosophy is merely the pursuit of abstract truth, then the answer would seem to be no. But if philosophy is instead a vocation, or a way of being-in-the-world, then the answer must be yes. The former views the goal of philosophy as a kind of accomplishment, while the latter views it as a kind of striving. And if striving requires the chance that we might always be wrong, then it requires vulnerability and risk.  

This vulnerability and risk, that comes with philosophy as a vocation, can be seen in nearly all of Yancy’s work, both implicitly and explicitly. Let us focus, however, on “Dear White America” and Backlash. In the former, Yancy models vulnerability through his analogy between racism and sexism: “What if I told you that I’m sexist?” (20). He tells us further,

As a sexist, I have failed women. I have failed to speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage critically and extensively their pain and suffering in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity of gender roles in my own life. I have failed to challenge those poisonous assumptions that women are “inferior” to men or to speak out loudly in the company of male philosophers who believe that feminist philosophy is just a non-philosophical fad . . . I am not innocent (20).

I would like to dwell with this for a moment, as this instance shows us much about Yancy’s work. First, he shows vulnerability—he is admitting to his audience that, regardless of his best intentions, he is guilty of sexism. In this case, vulnerability seems to mean a kind of opening oneself up to being wrong, and to desiring to be better. This is also a call for a reciprocal vulnerability in his audience, which was denied de facto. Yancy calls his audience to open themselves up to being wrong about racism, by modeling what that looks like himself via an analogy with sexism.

There is also risk here. Many men, myself included, have spent a decent portion of our lives thinking that we were good men, even feminists, only to learn later that we are complicit in forms of sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny that we can neither transcend nor extricate ourselves from. This, to the white male psyche, hurts—I thought I was a good ally, when actually I had failed (by, for example, staying silent in the midst of sexist discussions or paying to see movies whose plots pivot on the abuse or death of a woman). But in order to see this, I must risk my sense of innocence. And this is where we find that the truth hurts and has the power to “hurt, stun, unsettle, and unnerve.” Much like the interlocutor at the moment of aporia in a Socratic dialogue, I can either remain ignorant or strive to be better.

This is made explicit in the third chapter of Backlash in which Yancy asks his white readers to open themselves up, to risk their “innocence.” Yancy writes,

The oppressive machinations of whiteness must die so that white people (you) can truly live. What is meant by this death? It involves an opening, a risk, a fissure. As white, you must be open to a kind of death – a death of our stubbornness, a death of your denials, a death of your ‘innocence,’ a death of your arrogance… a death of all of those tricks that you play to convince yourselves that you are fine, that you are good ones, the sophisticated ones, the nonracist ones, the ones who truly care about justice, and a world without oppression, hatred, and racist violence (55).

Many white Americans think of ourselves as innocent as regards racism—“I have a black friend, I can’t possibly be racist” or “I don’t use the n-word, I can’t possibly be racist.” This is what Yancy often refers to as the “good white,” i.e. the white American who believes they are innocent of participation in the machinations of whiteness. This position, what Martin Luther King Jr. calls the white moderate, ultimately leads to stasis, stagnation, and the perpetuation of systems of oppression. Instead, Yancy argues that in order to actually fight racism, we white people must suffer the death of our innocence.

As I showed at the beginning, Yancy sees philosophy as a vocation in which we strive to be better and to make the world a better place. This requires vulnerability and the willingness to risk; otherwise we cannot improve ourselves or the world around us. Now, what might this look like in the classroom? This is a question that I hold dear to my heart, as I know that I have failed my students in this regard, just as I have failed women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. I have not taught my general body of students to be vulnerable.

In our interview, I asked Yancy what it might look like to include vulnerability in an undergraduate philosophy curriculum, and his reply is fascinating. It begins, he argues, with thinking about death:

I think that we need to exemplify, to perform, and to instantiate, our humility and frail humanity. So, right there before our students, perhaps even on the first day of class, I think that we need to speak to our students about how all of us will, at some point, die. This is not about spectacle or hyperbole. Also, I don’t attempt to communicate this in some sociologically abstract fashion, but to communicate the hard reality that you and I will die. In fact, my aim is to communicate the fact that you and I have been dying from the moment we began to live.[/footnote] From “Philosophy as a Practice of Suffering” (forthcoming).[/footnote]

A bit later, he adds that “I communicate to them that they will need to bear the weight of what it means that they will die, that the fellow student next to them will die, and that all that they deeply love will someday die.” This, for Yancy, is an attempt to encourage his students to be ethical in a different way than they are used to—of opening themselves up to a desire to be better people. Death is his tool, as we will all die. We can (and should) open up to the very real event of our own deaths and what this means. As he says in Backlash, “we are both irreplaceable,” and “as the universe expands and perhaps contracts again… we may never bear witness to being ever again” (xii). That is, you and I are embodied and thus finite beings. If this is the case, then I should feel urgency to be as good as possible, as this is all we have. Furthermore, because of my social positioning, I will always be living a life of privilege at the expense of others.

I am not innocent. Over the last six years, I’ve been trying to model vulnerability to my students in thinking about the crisis of oppression. I begin by telling them that, because of my skin color and genitalia, that I will be forever stuck in systems of oppression. I back this up with examples of my own implicit acts of racism and sexism, and I show them that I do not feel guilty about these incidents, but instead angry—which fuels me to fight these systems. That is, owning up to my own racism, sexism, and homophobia is not a sign that I should stop fighting, but that we can only be free when these systems have been dismantled entirely.

But, and I have only recently begun to understand this, none of that is enough. I cannot simply be modeling vulnerability and risk in regards to problems of oppression, but in relation to critical thinking as such. I have simply failed to include vulnerability and risk when I teach “the tools of critical thinking.” Akin to Yancy framing an introductory class in terms of death, I wonder what would happen if we framed a logic course as learning “how to be wrong gracefully, so that we can be better.” What would be required to inculcate this idea to our students? Are there specific skills that we can teach them, or is it only a matter of framing? I have no answers here – only questions. It is my hope that others will join me in asking these questions. And I wish I did have answers. As Yancy says elsewhere, while we white people get our shit together, bodies of color are being murdered in the street.

There is an urgency to this. We white philosophers can teach oppression in our courses, but what does this accomplish if our students are not actively being prepared to hear it, to be vulnerable, and to risk their own innocence?

This, I think, is one aspect of what it means to practice and teach philosophy in the wake of Backlash.

We have work to do.

February 28, 2019

Dear Predominantly White Institution,

We write as two members of a predominately white academic institution, Wittenberg University. One of us is a biracial student and one of us is a white faculty member. Following Dr. George Yancy’s letter in the New York Times on December 24, 2015, “Dear White America,” and his book Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Race in America (2018), which is a response to that letter, we write with the intention of addressing the members of our predominantly white institution (PWI) and similarly situated college campuses. Our goal, like Yancy’s, is to open up an institutional dialogue on matters related to race with the hope of furthering the mission and values of our institution. As members of this academic community we want to engage in a dialogue on Black institutional trauma and the opportunities an educational institution can afford its members, Black and white. We hope to educate our white members of the reality of institutionalized racial trauma and to identify areas, social and academic, for growth and healing in a way that furthers the education of all members of our campus community. We don’t think that the experiences we are reflecting upon at our PWI are unique to us, and we hope that this letter, like Yancy’s letter of love, can provide direction for awareness and growth for other institutions. This is our gift to our college whom we address from a space of love and hope for institutional healing and growth. 

To initiate this understanding and growth we must start with an understanding of where some of our problems originate. Racial trauma, also identified by psychologists as race-based trauma, can initiate from two primary actions. The first is the psychological stress that is triggered by microaggressions—questions, comments, or intended compliments that suggest something demeaning (DeLaney et al).1 The second can be caused by the very real threat of violence and aggression that have been experienced by Blacks historically and currently. Both of these are cultivated deep within the lived experience of Black individuals. For example, repeatedly being bombarded with news stories of the murder of Black children and adults by those who are part of institutional structures that are supposed to protect them is one way in which Blacks continually are reminded of the violence that is perpetuated on Black lives. We must strive to understand the lived experience of this trauma in order to educate ourselves on how we perpetuate it, and we must actively engage in practices that seek to end it. 

The concept of life as a Black individual is shaped by “the white racist violation of our humanity,” furthering that basis of trauma (Yancy, 57). Yancy experiences unanticipated impacts of the racialized trauma from the deluge of threatening hate mail that he received after writing “Dear White America.” He not only describes mood swings, anger, and nausea, but also the vulnerability that requires that he looks over his shoulder when in predominately white spaces (55). Yancy’s bodily comportment, as well as his psychological state, changes in response to the threat and reality of white racism. 

Although Yancy describes the psychological stress that can be triggered by people who intend to create fear and threat, the psychological stress that initiates racial trauma also can be activated by structural mechanisms that don’t require actions or intent from individuals. Instead, these allow for the perpetual conditions of the stress. This structuralized racial trauma is caused by institutions that allow for the production and reproduction of inequalities. Racial trauma is perpetuated in a structural and unintended way through microaggressions as Black students are asked what sport they are in college to play, or as black history is all but ignored, except for one month out of the year in order to keep students academically focused on what is considered to be valuable educational content. These occurrences seem minute but the reality of repeated microaggressions forced on to a student for the entirety of their life can be detrimental to their self-concept, their education, and how they function in the daily world. 

This trauma is also catalyzed by institutional practices. The institutional aspect of racism perpetuates racial trauma by the ignoring or the denying of Black experience by institutions or through institutional structures and their actors engaging Black students in ways that mirror broader social injustices. Thus, educational institutions, which are supposed to be focused on students’ intellectual and personal growth, can contribute to racial trauma in ways that are counter to the goals and values of the institution. Frequently these go unnoticed and unaccounted for and are viewed to be the individual experiences of individual Black students, not broader patterns of institutional racial bias. Just as victim blaming occurs for those who have experienced sexual assault, it also occurs for those who choose to speak out against institutionalized racism. Due to the nature of a PWI, it is not necessarily surprising that there are some institutional issues that result from a lack of knowledge of Black experience and lack of representation of Black faculty, staff, and students, as well as a lack of funding for activities that allow space to raise critical questions about race and racism on college campuses. For example, Black student organizations have received less funding on our campus due to the interpretation that their organizational activities are only for Black students. This results in Black students being afforded fewer opportunities to speak out at injustices without being edited. Thus, Black students frequently are silenced. 

This experience of racial trauma as it follows Black individuals from childhood into adulthood operates as a wound that is repeatedly reopened. As Black students attempt to speak out about what they believe is right, they are aware that this could have negative consequences for their education and their future. Head and eyes down becomes a survival skill, but one that doesn’t mitigate the trauma, which is brought about by “a profound sense of fear” that follows Black individuals throughout their lives. The position of a Black student at a PWI keeps this fear real (Yancy, 92). The perpetuation of fear caused by racial trauma must be understood, and it must be dismantled. There is an imperative that PWIs recognize their role in maintaining and furthering Black racial trauma because the trauma is inconsistent with most PWIs’ stated missions and values. Furthermore, there is a broader ethical mandate that PWIs and their members disable mechanisms of harm. The challenge is that whites, as individuals and as members of PWIs, can overtly and unintentionally be resistant to seeing the harm and understanding their role in it. This results in a level of institutional invulnerability that is hard to shake. 

White bodies, white spaces, and white institutions experience a type of perceived and real invulnerability that is enabled by the historical legacy of race in the U.S. To be white is to be more readily imagined as a doctor, judge, lawyer, professor, someone with knowledge and authority. Blacks even are frequently questioned about the veracity of their own knowledge about their experiences of being Black. Whitesplaining, the curious phenomenon of whites viewing themselves to be better interpreters of Black experience than Blacks, leads to whites informing Blacks how they are wrong about the racism they experience in predominately white spaces. 

Furthermore, white spaces frequently are read as neutral spaces that are open to all, even those that were once intentionally segregated spaces, as were most US colleges and universities. Predominately white educational institutions tend to perceive that they are providing an education for all, with the assumption that there is a neutral curriculum that could and should be embraced by all. What is missing is the understanding of how this “neutrality” was constructed such that Black experience and knowledge has been left out of the academic canon for so long that institutions have forgotten the level of intentionality that historically mandated this practice. PWIs have also forgotten how social spaces, such as fraternities and sororities, maintain their predominate whiteness through a combination of fees, recruitment, selection, and activities. This doesn’t mean that there are not Black members of these groups, but that they remain predominantly white because of how they are structured. Predominately white educational institutions function in a similar manner as social spaces. It is not that they don’t have Black students, faculty, or administrators, but that they remain predominantly white because of the opportunities and structures they afford and the opportunities and structures already present in the U.S. For example, at many PWIs including our own, the sciences are free from curricular diversity requirements as if the sciences have never had or currently don’t have an influence on how we understand race, or as if unlike other disciplines, the sciences haven’t had gatekeepers who maintained their whiteness.

What happens at the institutional level is that the predominant members of these institutions are unable to see the lack of neutrality in their curriculum, activities, or structure because these educational spaces are consistent with what they have experienced and what they have benefitted from. As Yancy describes it: “The movement of white bodies within spaces at predominately white institutions involves a dynamic set of institutional and normative forces that allow you to feel at home, for your body to move with ease” (108). Our lack of awareness of this embedded structure is a type of pernicious ignorance which philosopher Kristie Dotson describes as a predictable gap in our knowledge (2012).2 This type of ignorance is harmful for those who don’t benefit or are harmed by those structures, but who also have very little recourse to ask for change. This is precisely because the structures are perceived to be institutionally neutral and because the institutions are made up by those who have benefitted from those structures and thus intentionally or unintentionally will enable their maintenance and replication. Thus, even the simple act of walking across campus at a PWI “is not a racially neutral process, but a process that speaks to a racially saturated white space, historically embedded white racial power relationships, sedimentations of white normative assumptions, and a process where white bodies reap privilege and immunity for being white” (Yancy, 109). This shift in orientation is incredibly challenging because most white faculty and administrators are like Yancy’s white letter writers at the end of Backlash who want to accept and embrace the gift that Yancy has to offer. They want to recognize their own racism and make the personal changes in their lives to dismantle their own racism. Most of them are decidedly anti-racist—they are Yancy’s “anti-racist racists,” people who seek to rid themselves of their racism, yet like all white people in our current US social structure will never fully be free of it. 

However, the challenge is to recognize that it is not just individuals that suffer from racism, but our institutions as well, and reshaping these is a collective project that requires a more substantial reshaping than just changing individuals. Many academic institutions are well over 100 years old, many were built on the backs of Black labor, and these PWIs’ built in habits of racial privilege and structure are hard to see, let alone change. What is needed to dismantle these layers of racialized structures is a willingness for whites to experience what Yancy describes as “white vulnerability,” which involves a risking of one’s “own self-understanding” (107). For a PWI this vulnerability would involve both a substantial willingness to self-assess its own institutional structures that have benefitted from and maintained white privilege, as well as a profound willingness to engage in deep and meaningful institutional change, all the way through to thinking about curriculum, staffing, fees, and support for students. Yancy describes this substantially critical self-assessment as “un-suturing,” a taking apart at the seams through a “process of troubling a problematic ontology or mode of being” (112). This change needs to start from the experiences and ideas of Black members of our institution, including students. 

For our predominantly white institution, Wittenberg University, below are some changes that Black students would like to see, as well as a description of how our institution is working to respond to demands for change. These insights and this call for change are generated from a student activist group, Concerned Black Students (CBS), with a fifty-year history of raising questions on matters of race at our institution. For more information about CBS, see their website: https://www.wittenberg.edu/clubs/concerned–students-cbs.

Nancy Arden McHugh and Corina Cleveland

Wittenberg University

CONCERNED BLACK STUDENTS’ 

2019 CALL FOR ACTION AND CHANGE

“You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.”

 Cornel West

WE CALL FOR 

DIVERSITY AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE TRAINING FOR FACULTY, STUDENTS, STAFF, ADMINISTRATORS, AND CAMPUS POLICE WITH SPECIFIC ATTENTION TO OUR CAMPUS’S BLACK POPULATION. 

WE CALL FOR 

TO BE REGULARLY KEPT INFORMED OF DEMOGRAPHICS OF POLICE STOPS AND ARRESTS ON CAMPUS.

WE CALL FOR

FUNDING FOR CBS, MORE EQUITABLE TO THE AMOUNT WE CONTRIBUTE TO THE OVERALL STUDENT PROGRAMMING POOL. 

WE CALL FOR 

A CEASE AND DESIST TO THE HARASSMENT AND INTIMIDATION BY STUDENTS WHO YOU ALLOW TO CONTINUE TO UNDERMINE THE VALUES OF THIS UNIVERSITY WITH RESPECT TO WHOLENESS OF PERSON, COMPASSION AND INTEGRITY. 

WE CALL FOR

ADMINISTRATORS TO ATTEND CBS MEETINGS ONCE A MONTH. 

WE CALL FOR

MORE RACIAL MINORITY FACULTY AND STAFF, WITH PROOF OF ACTIVE WORK TO RECRUIT DIVERSE FACULTY AND STAFF.

WE CALL FOR

A MORE ROBUST MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY AND BLACK HISTORY MONTH WITH CBS HAVING THE PRIMRARY ROLE IN COORDINATING THESE EVENTS.

Our campus administration is working to understand and respond to the concerns raised by CBS. Some of their initial activities include the following:

Training: 

Mandatory diversity and restorative justice training for campus police, student senate, and senior staff. Growth in this area would include training for all members of campus. The newly formed President’s Council for Diversity and Inclusion is charged with recommending training for all campus populations. 

Demographics of Police Stops and Student Conduct Review:

Campus police are working to modify software so that they can track demographics of all police interactions, not just traffic stops. Furthermore, Student Conduct Board will now include a summary table of students represented by race/ethnicity of the student conduct process for all end of the semester reports. 

Funding for Concerned Black Students (CBS):

Student Senate revised their funding approach to include to include a category for “intercultural” student organizations. Although this increases the percentage of funding that could go to CBS, CBS does not believe it is commensurate with their representation on campus or their contributions to Student Activity Fund. 

Recruitment of a More Diverse Faculty and Staff:

The College has added a “Commitment to Diversity” statement to hiring guidelines and has started to employ “best practices” in advertising to reach a more diverse pool of candidates. 

Campus Programming:

CBS will be responsible for Black History Month Programming. Students of diverse backgrounds will be appointed to the campus programming committee for campus events in order to increase the diversity of speakers and events. 

These initiatives are a start in the right direction, but are ones that were unlikely to happen without the persistence and demand for change from Concerned Black Students, and not without having reached a tipping point on our campus. All PWIs, including our own, have ethical, educational, and practical mandates to develop and support a diverse campus climate. This requires active and intentional work on all parts of our campus. We are proud of and indebted to CBS for requiring us to confront our shortcomings and hope as a campus community we will continue dismantling our whiteness to develop a more inclusive and diverse campus community. 

Reading the so-called “manifesto” of the white Australian man who murdered fifty-one people across two mosques in Christchurch on the 18th of March 2019, I was struck by a sickening sense of familiarity. Something in the writer’s tone of false bravado, his deeply paranoiac worldview, his frequent, capitalized outbursts, his hysterical conviction of encroachment, of threat, recalled the letters, emails and voice messages sent to George Yancy following the publication of his op-ed “Dear White America.” 

This correlation points to why Yancy’s analysis of the white supremacist abuse he received in Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Race in America is instructive, not only within a North American context, but in relation to understanding and confronting white supremacy across the globe. It also points to the deep urgency of that instruction. 

I was first asked to respond to Backlash during the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in Australia, when I found myself returning again and again to Yancy’s book.  At the time, I remember being struck by the scramble to claim “This is not us,”1 to distance the white, national self from the act of violence it had produced and to reframe this violence as an aberration. Here, the message of Backlash was crucial. In the book, Yancy demands that white people pause before we rush in to proclaim ourselves apart from the problem, performing our outrage in a coded attempt to re-establish a narrative of white innocence. In this pause, Yancy asks that we instead allow for the possibility that we may not know ourselves, that white racist violence may have something to teach us about ourselves that we have been unwilling to see. Rather than deny our relation to the problem of white supremacy, Yancy asks that we instead begin to see our own deep imbrication within this problem; indeed, to see ourselves as the problem (118). Here, Yancy traces the roots of white supremacist violence back to a much broader and more pervasive white imaginary: one in which the denial of relation to the racialized person, and the resulting freezing of the racialized person as object sits at the heart of white subjectivity. In this response I want to explore what Backlash has to teach us about the kind of work performed by this imaginary, and to analyze how Yancy builds his challenge to it. Ultimately, I want to draw on Yancy’s insights to ask how white settler subjects in an Australian context should take up this challenge, given the continuing landscape of settler-colonial white supremacy and the rising tide of overt white fascism. 

The White Racial Imaginary

“As Black people, within the context of the long history of white racist America, we have been perceived, constructed and treated in ways that reduce our complex lives to that which white people have imagined us to be” (Yancy, 2).

In Backlash, George Yancy’s analysis of the hate mail he received after publishing Dear White America shows us a whiteness that is dangerously out of depth with itself; a whiteness that is desperate, reeling, unstable. The painstakingly handwritten letters, the voices trembling with a hatred they cannot hold; the elaborate, hysterical fantasies of victimhood. This is an image of a white self deeply invested in a pathological, historical racial imaginary, a white self deeply oriented within this imaginary and threatened by its loss. Yet where he knows that white readers will be tempted to declare, “This is not us!” to decry, to deny, to distance ourselves from “those bad racists,” Yancy demands we do not. Instead, he entreats us to look closer: “I ask that you NOT treat the vile and racist disclosures in these chapters as aberrations…This is about white America, not exceptions to it, but dimensions of its oppressive rule, its deep historic racist white imaginary, and its normative structures” (24–25). 

In Backlash, Yancy explains that just as any act of white supremacist violence takes its logics from a specific historical racist imaginary, the persistence of such an imaginary is itself enabled by much broader processes of white, (neo)liberal self-making, which in the US and Australian contexts are inseparable from the founding violence of the white settler-colonial state. As a white subject, I can only think of myself as a rational ends-choosing individual insofar as I can disavow the histories of violent dispossession through which whiteness is created and maintained, and my own profound embeddedness in these histories. At the same time, my claim to self-possessed individuality (“I didn’t ask for any of that, it has nothing to do with me!”) actively erases my relationship to the continuing violence of the colonizing state. This was evident in the response of ex-Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to the Christchurch Massacre, in which he denied any relation between the attack and systemic white supremacy by repeatedly claiming “we are a nation of individuals” and denouncing “mindless tribalism” on all sides. But this repetition is a slippage; it reveals to us the work the statement performs. Here, the entreaty to individualism (as if seeing group identity were itself the problem) sidesteps accountability for the structural white supremacy which gave shape and meaning to the killer’s actions. “It is so easy,” writes Yancy, “for white people to retreat to a form of individualism designed to nullify their group status” (71). 

Yet it is our “group status” that has something very important to tell us about ourselves as white subjects, something we are deeply invested in not knowing. Insofar as a liberal imaginary posits the subject as bounded, intentional, ends-choosing, self-transparent and self-possessed, it allows me to deny the sense in which, as white, I am always-already embedded within, and both materially and psychically reliant on, racial structures of power. Just as statistically my whiteness will contribute to shaping the income of my parents, where I go to school, the education level I receive, my likelihood of experiencing incarceration and/or of dying from curable disease, so Indigeneity in Australia corresponds to the inverse of these outcomes. Similarly, the terms which characterize my white feminine body as innocent (terms which structure my relationship to myself, how I feel in my own body) are directly premised on the imagined criminality of a racialized other. Yancy explains that, like the motion of a seesaw, these two sides are not unrelated but rather constructed through and dependent upon one another. My easy movement through the world is directly premised on my perceived distance from Bla(c)kness,2 and in this way antiblackness is integral to a positive experience of the world that I take to be normal, natural and inevitable. Yancy explains “your existence as white depends upon your distance from us as Black. In fact, where would you be without us” (57)? In this context, my insistence that my action be narrated through personal intention rather than effect (but I didn’t mean to be racist!) erases my responsibility for the complex ways I am embedded and complicit within systems of racialized power that I did not create and—if white supremacy is doing its job—I may neither see nor understand. Yancy cautions “when it comes to white racism, you are not fully autonomous, etymologically a ‘law’ unto yourself” (77); “As white,” he explains, “you are unable to give an account of your racist limits” (79).

 In the sense that learning to recognize myself as white through a Black counter-gaze reveals to me my own embeddedness within racialized structures of power (structures which BIPOC folk cannot easily choose not to see, as these structures are a source of ongoing injury), it threatens not only my claim to the universal but the very structure of my self-understanding.3 It demands that I admit that I was never entirely in possession of myself, that my agency in the world was always-already deeply social and thus racial; that my white self is dependent upon a construction of the racialized other; and that the problem of race is thus never “out there” but instead very much “in here:” a white problem (118). It is in this sense, I think, that Yancy asks for “love” from his white readers in return for the gift of his insight; not love in any sentimental sense of the word, but love in the sense of willingness to enter into relation with him, even when that relation means risking one’s white (racist) self (81).

The Opacity of the White Racist Self

“What I’m doing throughout the book as a whole is offering you, white reader, a way to engage in a deeper self-understanding of what it means to be white from a perspective outside of your self-understanding, a place that is closed off” (13).

In Backlash, Yancy challenges this white liberal construction of the self through doing exactly what this imaginary cannot tolerate and narrating whiteness back to itself, drawing upon his own affective, embodied experience as a source of knowledge in doing so. In refusing to shy away from the impact of racist abuse upon his own body (“again, I want to scream” [5]), Yancy refuses the white settler ontology embedded in academic demands for objectivity, explaining “for we are told that what we know in our very bodies to be true isn’t credible, which is a different kind of violence, the epistemic kind. I have certainly experienced this” (47). Where Bla(c)k knowledge of whiteness challenges the control of the white narrator and has thus long been threatened and suppressed, Yancy embraces this knowledge and demands that his white readership do the same. He explains “I am offering you a gift, white reader, a gift of perspective, a new way of understanding yourself.” Tracing the tropes, fantasies and accusations directed at his body back to long-standing narratives of anti-blackness, Yancy demonstrates that he sees “in and through”4 his white correspondents. Their violent imaginaries laid bare, his correspondents are revealed as deeply invested and irrational, attached to a white imaginary and threatened by the loss of this attachment. Insofar as they draw on racist narratives to project this sense of threat onto Yancy’s own body (performing a “magic rite”5 whereby suddenly it is Yancy himself who is the “racist,” the “race baiter,” the sexual predator, the threat [7]) their logic is embedded within a historical, racist framework which they refuse to avow. In this sense, they remain deeply opaque to themselves, invested in a productive epistemology of ignorance,6 a dangerous mode of not-seeing.  

Yancy is careful to point out, however, that this self-opacity is often as present in the actions of white “progressives” as it is in expressions of overt white supremacy. He recounts how at a conference he is mistaken by white academics for his colleague, the only other Black professor present, no less than seven times. So invested were these white academics in a “fixed” notion of Blackness that they literally failed to see the person standing in front of them. Just as the white officer, again and again, “sees” a criminal, “sees” a gun, so Yancy’s colleagues “saw” him, no less than seven times, as a different man. In asking ourselves how it is that a person can become so invested in a racist imaginary that they are driven to commit acts of physical violence, I think, along with Yancy, that we also need to ask what underpins the fixity of the racialized figure in the white imagination more generally. How might our certainty about ourselves, as white settlers, depend upon it? In his memoir No Friend But the Mountains Kurdish writer and journalist Behrouz Boochani responds to the sense in which he is objectified across both the left and right side of politics, his body a means through which white subjects work to carve out their image of a good white self and nation. “Refugees are not angels and we are not devils,” he entreats, “both ideas come from the same framework, and it is a dehumanizing one…in Western culture there is a deep desire to see refugees devoid of complexity.”7 This sense of being fixed under a white gaze and denied interiority is part and parcel of the process of racialization.8 Like the scene in Jordan Peele’s Get Out where Daniel Kaluuya falls backwards screaming into the abyss, his body frozen before a white interrogator, so racialization fixes the subject “at the epidermal level,” rendering their voice not only unheard, but—for as long as the subject remains invested in a fantasy of their own whiteness—unhearable (7). This kind of fantasy, Yancy explains, is also fatal; to the killer who stalked Trayvon Martin through the streets and ended his young life “Martin’s Black embodiment was always-already known; the killer failed, refused, or just didn’t give a damn to ask ‘who art thou’” (113). White Australian police officer Zachary Rolfe similarly acted out of a violent fantasy of white innocence when he chose to murder 19 year old Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker in cold blood; a fantasy that was vigorously defended in the public and legal response to the killing. The deep objectification, the refusal to hear, that framed the violence in each of these cases and many more speaks to our refusal, as white settler subjects, to be in relation with the racialized other, and, consequently, with ourselves. 

Unsuturing

“Racism is not a miscalculation, or a simple cognitive distortion, but whiteness is a way of being embodied, a white way of being. It is a lie that is so intimate that it is you, the normative you….” (115).

I want to return now to “so-called Australia”,9 where at the time of writing this piece the clamor to distance the political mainstream from the events in Christchurch had reached fever pitch. I want to ask how, as white settler-colonial subjects, we should take up the challenge George Yancy offers in Backlash to respond differently, not only to the attack in Christchurch, but to all acts of white supremacist violence. 

Here it is useful to consider what Yancy calls the “sutured” and “unsutured” self. To be sutured, Yancy explains, is to remain closed off, sealed, off, unaffected. He writes that “To be sutured within the context of white identity is indicative of ‘the narrative authority’ of the white self that seals itself off from ‘otherness’” (105). A white liberal imaginary, in which the subject experiences herself as bounded and autonomous, her agency projected out onto the world rather than formed in relation with it, is in this sense a method of suturing, a denial of one’s relation to and vulnerability before the other. In her claim to self-transparency, the sutured white self refuses to recognize herself in her impact on the other; refuses to stare back into Baldwin’s “disagreeable mirror” and learn from what she may find there. In this sense, the declaration “this is not us” performs an act of re-suturing; of prematurely answering a question, of staunching a wound, of restoring a self that is always-already known. But what is the self that we are attempting to restore? What violence is implicit in, is necessary for the production of, this self? 

In Australia, a nation founded on genocidal settler-colonialism in which Indigenous peoples continue to face a life expectancy nearly ten years lower and incarceration rates fifteen times higher than whites, the kind of phobic white imaginary present in the logics of the Christchurch killer has a long and violent precedent. As Chelsea Watego explains, “Australian history has more than a racial dimension. Race has been foundational to this country”10. From Terra Nullius to ongoing dispossession, from the historic White Australia Policy to today’s torturous and criminal system of mandatory indefinite detention, from a media dominated by Islamophobic, anti-Bla(c)k rhetoric, to a federal parliament which applauds a senator after he calls for a “final solution” to Muslim immigration; the atrocities in Christchurch emerge out of a racial imaginary inseparable from the production and maintenance of the modern Australian state. In Backlash, Yancy similarly locates the white supremacist abuse he receives within a dense racial history that continues to structure the contemporary US.    

In this context, the declaration “This is not us” functions as an act of masking, of sealing over, of closing up.11 Where the act of violence unmasks the supposed innocence of the white self,12 this declaration works as a refusal to remain undone; a rejection of the moment in which we might, faced with the pain of the other, surrender our power to narrate. Urging his white readers to remain “unsutured” in the face of Black pain, Yancy invites us into a space of perceptual breakdown, one “linked to the terrifying realization that your ‘innocence’ was not real at all” (114). To remain unsutured in this context is, I think, to recognise that white supremacy is not something happening “out there,” but the condition of possibility of our most intimate world-making as white settler subjects: our subjectivities, our selves. It is thus to open ourselves up to a much deeper level of responsibility in relation to structural white supremacy; to commit to action driven by what Yancy calls an “ethical insomnia.” 

In relation to events such as Christchurch, it demands from white settlers a very different response. Rather than leaping in to assert, “This is not us,” it might instead demand the question, “Who are we?” Answering this question, Yancy suggests, will require that we admit the inadequacy of our existing narratives, the extent of our own opacity to ourselves; it will require that we turn towards the other as a knowing subject. In the context of so-called Australia, Gary Foley, Jacqui Katona, Robbie Thorpe, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson are just some of the voices that have, for a long time now, been answering this question that white Australia remains unwilling to ask of itself. Yancy would tell us that it is far past time to listen to them.