by Ian Williams
And yet another problem with evidence, or, more specifically, with substantiating a racist event, is that white intention is used to excuse white behaviour while little or no thought is given to the impact of that behaviour on Black people. White people will do their share of racial work when they habitually recognize the negative impact of their behaviour rather than excusing themselves for having neutral intentions. By shifting to impact over intention, they acknowledge, even prioritize, the feelings of Black people, the unfair disorientation that we are constantly contending with while they merrily continue their day.
There are other problems with evidence. When a white person, as in the poodle comment, isolates each of our experiences as unfortunate but anomalous, she is questioning our relevance as individuals. When she claims that we have misinterpreted a situation, she is questioning the sophistication of our mental faculties. Both of those acts are rooted in the ideas on the inferiority of Black humanity: the first diminishes the value of an individual Black life, the second diminishes Black intellect.
As you can see by now, the need to “prove” racism is loaded with problems for Black people. There is no once-and-for-all piece of evidence that will stop the questions and doubt over racial discrimination. Even clear, recorded evidence does not acquit police officers of crimes.
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And evidence of what exactly? That racism exists? That one is socially literate enough to accurately perceive racism in a situation? I believe that many white people can accept the fact that racism exists, but for them it exists elsewhere, not in the daily drone of their communities and workplaces. So to identify it in a place where they can’t perceive it or admit that it’s possible is either a false claim or evidence of their ignorance. Neither of those explanations for their blindness is a feel-good. So fragility ensues, the enormous effort white people make to give alternate readings to evidence, to colonize reality, articulated or unarticulated, with That was not racist. Maybe you’re being oversensitive.
I suggest that we stop asking, What’s the proof? and instead ask, What’s your experience? Proof elevates the modes of reasoning and the interpretations of white people. But, again, the experiences of Black people are the evidence, not the interpretations of white people.
Does this mean we believe that the incident in the drugstore is racist because a Black person says it is? Tricky, right? Well, chances are that the effect is racist, in that it triggers and coheres with other experiences in that Black person’s life; so yes, it is being read as racist and those feelings matter. Replace the search for some kind of objective evidence (scientific, logical, statistical) and instead focus on the effect of an incident and most likely you’ll find that the bewildering, disruptive, disorienting effect that the event has caused in the Black person’s psyche needs to be addressed in addition to the structural and systemic issues that make such psychic violence possible.
I suppose what’s beneath all these issues with evidence is trust. Who and what is assumed to be trustworthy? Who gets to skip to the conclusion? In a high school chemistry class, where I was within one point of an A+, I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. So, during a parent-teacher conference, my mother asked. The teacher explained that I was skipping steps and needed to show my work. I was pissed by that, because I was a kid who valued efficiency—skip grades, skip steps, get to the answer and the point. I didn’t just move forward, I accelerated through life. So for the teacher to ask me to slow down ran contrary to my nature, and it also signalled that he didn’t believe I had arrived at the answer through legitimate steps. He did not trust me.
To believe my word means that you trust me. And I won’t lie to you if your trust matters to me. Each of us risks being cheated or hurt in this arrangement.
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Both parents were furious when my niece told them she had been called a n. But they differed as to how to respond. The white mother said they should speak to the school administration. The Black father, distrustful of admin, said my niece should handle the situation herself. They’d equip her, sure, but she needed to know how to deal with it.
On one hand, you have the belief in a system to make things better. On the other, the belief that the problem of race needs to be handled between individuals. Teach a kid how to fight if she’s bullied—that line of thinking. She would, after all, be facing this throughout her life.
As I understand the story, my niece dealt with the issue herself. She told the girl, Don’t ever talk to me like that. But no one was punished. I don’t think the girl apologized. No solution would undo the disorientation. One girl tested a word on another. My niece tested a response. Together, at ten, they entered American politics.
TEN BULLETS ON WHITENESS
One can never really see into the heart, the mind, the soul of another.
—JAMES BALDWIN,
“The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”
1. WHITENESS EXISTS
Whiteness exists as an institution. Institutions are generally abstract. They are visible in their effects but invisible in physical form, except by way of symbol. You’d have a hard time pointing to the state or to marriage, but you could point to their metonyms: a white man in a navy suit, the master bedroom. We sense whiteness because it organizes society and insists on conformity across time, but we don’t always recognize the instruments it uses to uphold power. Moreover, the symbols of Klansmen, skinheads, and burning crosses are extremist caricatures of a more commonplace presence. As an institution, whiteness has systems (such as capitalism), operators (who occupy every leadership position), media (that exports images of Blackness), and products of the white mind.
Whiteness also exists as a cluster of ethnicities, not as a homogeneous, monolithic race. White people can accurately and confidently trace their ethnicities back to specific European countries by using state and family records in a way that many Black people across the Americas cannot without using DNA ancestry tests. Irish, Italian, and Jewish people were notably excluded from whiteness until fairly recently.
There is a difference between whiteness and white people. Yet I cannot resolve the difference as neatly as I would like. After all, white people uphold whiteness and transfer its crimes to institutions, processes, bureaucracy, to keep their hands clean in the same way that some wealthy people launder their assets. The institution of whiteness is better protected than white people themselves. The people are disposable in the ongoing machinery of this system. The power of institutionalized whiteness extends beyond the span of any individual life.
Do white people separate Blackness from Black people?
Perhaps white people should bear more responsibility for whiteness. I’m conflicted at the moment by how Black people carry the stereotypes of Blackness, even if we don’t contribute to them, while white people can repudiate the history of whiteness as separate from themselves.
The bodies of some people are repositories of whiteness. Some bodies are hosts. Whiteness would have you believe that race and whiteness are separate and that race originates in the Black body. But no, race originates in the white imagination.
Exposing the existence of whiteness is important because invisibility renders it innocent. The existence of whiteness is obvious to Black people and white people alike, but Black people are daily aware of it while white people only occasionally need be—which is advantageous to white people and deleterious to Black people.
Depending on one’s purposes, whiteness can be invisible the way God is invisible—enormous, conceptual, debatable, omnipresent. For anti-racists, it becomes something to dismantle or reject. Or it can be invisible the way a virus is—small and ubiquitous. At this level, it becomes something to manage, discuss, study. One feels no major threat until the viral load exceeds one’s preparedness. The third way it can be invisible is not through any property of its own but through blindness.
When white people do not see their whiteness, they can claim that they—and the structures of the world—are “not racist” or postracial. They may be blind to themselves, but they are not blind to the racialization of others. Whiteness wishes that white people would remain blind to themselves and accept their experiences as typical of everyone’s, so relations of dominance could continue unquestioned.
“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist,” Baudelaire warned. Whiteness is most disorienting when it is undetectable.
2. WHITENESS CENTRES ITSELF
Whiteness imagines itself at the centre of everything it touches. Time itself begins in Greenwich and the Prime Meridian sets every point on Earth as east or west of London. Whiteness centres its face in a mirror that we all look into. Its political structures are the required template for how nations of non-white people organize themselves. Its subjectivity is both the supreme state and the default setting. While I was in university, literary critic Harold Bloom published this audacious title: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. That’s how one white man writes about another white man. Whiteness sets itself as the “god term,” to be desired, pursued, and obeyed if you’re white, or worshipped, emulated, and, yes—still—obeyed if you’re not.
Default and supreme.
Those two words work hand in glove. We go from default (it would be redundant or fussy to identify white characters since their lives stand in for all lives, like man for humankind) to tenets of supremacist ideology (white characters are the model of all lives). Until recently, white characters were never identified as such in novels, perhaps because for a long time there were only white people in books. The desire for a mono-racial world persists every time a writer does not need to state that a character is white.
Everything it touches.
Of all myths, I find Midas the most terrifying. I was a child when I heard it, and the thought of being touched and frozen into gold was as close to the concept of death as I could understand. Now, after living through a pandemic and 1990s sex education, I think it’s the contagion that frightens me most. Whether the touch was uninvited or desired, it had the power to render me powerless. You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Whiteness, like Midas’s touch, turns everything into what it wants. It replicates its values and attitudes in you.
Here’s another way to understand how the touch of whiteness works. On the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, the famous central panel, God’s finger is an inch from Adam’s. Most interpretations claim that this is God about to touch Adam, but I see it as the moment after God has touched Adam. The whole painting loads outward from that point. The touch of God connects man to the divine. The touch of whiteness was seen as a gift. Percentages of white blood mattered substantially to the working and social conditions of a Black slave. To have enough blood to pass as white meant mobility. The touch of whiteness, right in the middle of the painting, connects one to the electricity of power. Furthermore, as Adam in perfection is an extension of divinity, the touch of whiteness makes no distinction between whiteness and humanity. Its attributes become desirable (to have different hair is to have wrong hair). Its atrocities (say, stemming from the desire for superiority) are regarded as human nature.
3. WHITENESS VALUES ITSELF
Whiteness has high self-esteem. It is confident.
On my first day in a Canadian school after moving from Trinidad, my teacher instructed a white boy to help me spell journal so I could print it on the cover of my exercise book. I thought, But wait, I know how to spell journal. I had almost won a spelling competition the year before (the word nought cost me). The white teacher made an assumption about my intelligence and the superior intelligence of the white boy. To make matters worse, whiteboy spelled journal without the u: jornal. And worse still, I’m ashamed to admit, I copied the incorrect version, although I knew better, because I trusted whiteness. I understood my island to be a speck in comparison with this great, advanced country, so I doubted my own knowledge. When my teacher spotted the error, she paused. She did not attribute it to the white boy, or to me, not directly. She did not correct it either. At home, I showed my mother and we inserted the u.
When white people say to me, You sound white, they mean it as a compliment. When Black people say it, they mean it as an insult.
Whiteness loves what it has. It loves having. It takes pride in its skyscrapers and beaches. My parents have been disappointed with every North American beach they have visited (just some dirty water, is their assessment). Many racialized immigrants react to whiteness’s prized possessions and achievements with a perplexed, What’s so special about that? North American cities can’t compete with Asian cities in density, infrastructure, complexity, and energy.
Whiteness valuates itself like a stock about to hit market. It picks numbers out of the stratosphere. Western art is worth more than art from the rest of the world. Art by white people is priceless not because it displays rare talent but because it defines what talent is, even when the aesthetic values are contradictory—realistic, abstract, or non-representational. The art world pours money into the contemporary art of whiteness.
To be crude about the value of whiteness, consider the price of kidneys:
African kidney:
$1,000
Filipino kidney:
$1,300
Moldovan or Romanian kidney:
$2,700
Turkish or Peruvian kidney:
$10,000
US kidney:
$30,000
The price of a Black slave in 1850, adjusted for inflation, would be $12,000.
4. WHITENESS PRESERVES ITSELF
In historical narratives and current news, whiteness maintains a record of itself from its own perspective and destroys counter-perspectives, even if that means killing Black and Indigenous people to do so. This method of record keeping is legitimized through reductionist scientific slogans like survival of the fittest. Black and Indigenous people have not been the fittest, whatever that means, or had the best conditions, yet we have survived. I wonder whether our persistence is an affront to whiteness. Through various means and obstacles, from policing and incarceration to drugs to social segregation and moral humiliation, the active destruction of Black people is in service to the preservation of whiteness. After all, one can be preserved through one’s fitness or through the destruction of one’s rival.
Whiteness diffuses itself through the dominant epistemological lens of the time, whether that be science or philosophy or art or religion. The records of whiteness are fixed with the most durable form of record keeping available and disseminated by the most extensive media. Whiteness restricts who has access to these forms of preservation. By making it illegal for slaves to read and write, whiteness turned Black lives into vapour and kept those stories out of circulation.
5. WHITENESS ADAPTS
Preservation is how whiteness controls its story in the past and present; adaptation is how it prepares itself for the future. Whiteness adapts by changing rules, not by changing itself. It raises interest rates, lowers them. It raises prices. It lowers them. When I lived across from a gas station, I monitored price fluctuations to the decimal. Prices appear to be yo-yoing in response to market forces, but they are in fact within the control of people, real people who wash their pillowcases and make choices that preserve their wealth.
Here’s another example. Whiteness can adapt to pressures in its surroundings by gentrifying neighbourhoods, which is its word for making the undesirable desirable, simply by entering a space. One of the most troubled postal codes in Canada, East Hastings in Vancouver, runs parallel to Gastown, one of the most desirable neighbourhoods. Old buildings were converted into lofts, cobblestone roads preserved, merchan
dise priced just north of affordability. The urban professionals who live in Gastown move through that shared district with sunglasses and earbuds, insulated from the contrast.
Whiteness is like a melody where the tune stays the same but the words change. Think of how “Autumn Leaves” appears in contrafactum. (I like that word here because it sounds as if it means something else.) Alternatively, sometimes whiteness has to surrender its recognizable melody, but its chord structure remains the same. Slow it down, speed it up, change the genre, but in all these covers, the spirit of the song is the same. Dominance.
White people are creative, sure, but not more than other people on Earth. Creativity or intelligence is not the domain of a single race.
Whiteness, as an institution, is also creative in its strategies to remain dominant. Up to the middle of the last century, white people were still emboldened to state their racist ideas without evidence or repercussions. Now it has adapted to the climate of exasperated racialized people and a vocal generation with access to direct dissemination of its rage by claiming that it is not racist.