In 2020, all the material, temporal and psychological layers of white sight became visible. White reality was torn, perhaps even began to fail. These tears were visible when people removed Confederate statues, reclaimed the streets from police, and engaged in practices of repair, reparation and restitution.
The result was a general crisis of whiteness that continues. It opened what the writer Arundhati Roy called a “portal” to a different future, through which it was also possible to see the multiple pasts present in the version of reality white sight projects. As recent events have made all too clear, white reality did not altogether fail. Nor did it succeed in suturing the tears in its world view. That’s what a crisis is.
While “2020” had very specific causes in the interaction of the pandemic and police violence, it revealed a long-standing interaction of police, the monument and sadistic anger as the means of sustaining white sight. As the anthropologists Nika Dubrovksy and David Graeber insightfully put it, monumentality is guarded by the police, meaning “the ability to turn control over violence into truth.” The monument incarnates violence as “truth,” while police deploy violence in the interests of maintaining settler-colonial “truth.”
Expressing these “truths” mobilizes the constitutive anger of the settler colony. As Virginia Woolf once observed, anger is the “attendant sprite of [patriarchal] power.” It is a myth, not caused by specific incidents but central to the “folk lore” that sustains the cultural unconscious where whiteness lives. To make that myth fail, monumentality must fall.
Sadist Monumentality
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had equally perceived the role of “inter-racial sex jealousy and the accompanying sadism” in the restoration of white supremacy. Controlling that violence into the “truth” of white supremacy engendered the Confederate monument, beginning with the Richmond statue of Robert E. Lee in 1890.
Centennial Park, Nashville. Photo: author.
As it happens, I’m in Tennessee as I write this on a long-planned visit. Nashville’s Centennial Park was opened in 1897 for the city’s centennial. In the resegregated South, access to the park was part of what Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of whiteness. Unsurprisingly the Park included a Confederate monument, which has now been re-named “Civil War Memorial.” But a plaque reading “To the Heroism of the Private Confederate Soldier” gives the game away.
As you look at the statue from the intended viewpoint, the background is dominated by a full-size recreation of Athens’s Parthenon. First built for the Centennial and rebuilt in concrete in the 1920s, this bombastic version of the Parthenon is a monument to white supremacy on the grand scale. Unbuilding white sight means that the Parthenon must come down. It’s a bad copy, anyway, and the only parallel between Nashville and Athens is in the fantasies of white supremacy.
Nashville’s Parthenon. Photo: author.
The classical statue, incarnated in the Parthenon frieze reproduced in its entirety in Nashville, was the form that whiteness had claimed in Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Man (1854), published in the years prior to the Civil War to support the claim that there were entirely separate species of human being. Today, when Ron De Santis and other far right activists seek to return education to being grounded in “Western civilization,” it is that separate whiteness they intend.
Protestors against police violence in 2020 were then entirely accurate in seeing racist monuments as the infrastructural expression of white sight. By the same token, it became clear in 2020 that for certain white-identified people, whiteness was more important than their health or safety, let alone the shibboleth of democracy. Monuments are at least easy to find. Even tagging their plinth with graffiti can de-activate their function as the infrastructure of white supremacy. Now for the harder part: How can the constitutive patriarchal anger-power of white supremacy materialized in the monument be de-activated?
Class Failure
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon saw the marginalized and precarious people in Algeria’s cities, those who “turn in circles between suicide and madness,” as its most revolutionary class. These ungovernable and spontaneous “revolutionary forces,” dismissed by Marx as the lumpenproletariat, were the only ones who could create a new way to be human. Think of Ali La Pointe in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Recall, too, that on the first day of Algerian independence, these urban fighters set about taking down French colonial statues.
Building on Fanon’s ideas, the Black Panthers visualized the US as racially divided between Black Country and Mother Country. Both countries were internally divided between the traditional working-class and the new Lumpen. For Eldridge Cleaver, the “working-class is the right wing and the lumpenproletariat is the left-wing.”
The Lumpen were those who could not or would not find a place, those who had no part. George Jackson saw this could mean a realignment of “campus agitators” with “lumpenproletariat intellectuals” and redirected traditional organizers. Any chance of achieving that shift was repressed by murderous state violence.
In the UK, sociologist Frank Worsley, who met Fanon in Accra in 1960, saw another possibility. He worried that this splitting of what had been thought of as “the” working class—often just called “the class”—could transform sectors of the traditional working class into “shock troops of Right wing populism.” Reading Worsley helped Stuart Hall to his signature insight: “race is the modality through which class is lived and experienced.”
From the present-day, it seems clear that the identification of a segmented “white working class” has indeed resolved into shock troops of Right wing populism, supporting Brexit and Trump respectively. That realignment was a reaction to decolonization and the challenge to imperial power, whether in the UK or US.
It won’t help in this context to use imperial and nation-state derived concepts to unbuild whiteness, such as the old call to be a “race traitor,” or more recent ones for whiteness’s “death.” That’s just redirecting white patriarchal anger against itself, which only validates it.
More precisely still, anti-racist white-identified people should not target a monolithic “whiteness” as such because that concedes that it exists. Worse yet, it makes it central, just as patriarchal anger-power would have it. I’m trying in this project to hack white sight as a technology, an operating system that helps produce the monument that does not exist: whiteness as such.