Demand the Impossible. Again.
Today, the book that prompted this project—White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness—is formally published. I don’t think a book about white supremacy is cause for the usual “publication day” celebration. Today does mark a commitment finally upheld and the beginning of whatever the book’s readers produce from it.
While you write a book, it’s a conversation with your friends—real or imagined. Once it’s in the world, the book makes its own way. The Right to Look (2011) became a book above all noted for its articulation of slavery and visuality. The road from there to White Sight seems obvious in retrospect.
But I can also look back to Bodyscape (1995) and see that I discussed museums—including the American Museum of Natural History, now my favorite museum to hate—statues and whiteness. That’s also a clear connection to White Sight but one that it took over a quarter of a century to complete.
It’s been a journey away from what you might call “micro-liberalism.” Stuart Hall used to say there was a little Thatcherism in the most radical of people—when they went shopping at Sainsbury’s (an upscale grocery store) before a protest, perhaps. Deleuze and Guattari spoke of “microfascism” as the desire for control (“take back control”). Micro-liberalism would be the desire that the representative system actually work, or at least help, to make people’s lives better. Which it doesn’t, does it?
Monohumanism
In the 1990s, white-presenting and white-identified people had hopes. Dylan Rodríguez has specified them as “the (neo)liberal post- racial ‘hope’ of post– civil rights,” that later became “post–racial humanism crystallized in the symbolic and institutional matter of the Obama presidency.” I once even had hope in the Oslo Accords, despite Edward Said’s entirely accurate critique at the time.
Collectively, Rodríguez calls the past half-century “white reconstruction.” But he frames that moment within half-a-millenium of domination by what the Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls “monohumanism,” the belief that there is only one way to be fully human.
I made the same journey. At first I thought this would be a book concentrating on the contemporary. And it is, only I think of all the past time that is still present since “1492” as the contemporary. For Indigenous peoples, the moment that white colonizers arrived is contemporary. In the US, it has been all too clear that “1619” remains very present.
Within visual culture, the resurgence of white supremacy has been deeply connected to Renaissance ways of seeing and their adoption of Classical sculpture. I worried about whether I could write about this period, so far from my own areas of “competence.” On Juneteenth 2020, the artist Isaac Julien streamed his 2003 film Baltimore as part of the commemorations. As I watched film director Melvin van Peebles direct a quizzical gaze at the Walters Museum’s The Ideal City, I saw how it could be done.
Still from Isaac Julien, Baltimore (2003), single-channel version. Courtesy of the artist.
I started to think of both ways of seeing and visual media of all kinds as comprised of layers. These layers contain past, present and future ways of encountering each other. Sometimes a layer may be invisible but it is nonetheless present and part of the interaction. The events of 2020 de-invisibilized, to use feminist Verónica Gago’s term, all the layers in white sight. The impossible task I set myself was to give an account of those layers, as if unfolding a Photoshop document.
Demand the Impossible
The work at hand always involves what is said to be impossible. In the concluding pages of The Fire Next Time, a book that is very nearly as old as I am, published sixty years ago—on January 31, 1963—James Baldwin asked his readers to acknowledge that :
Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality…I know what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least one can demand.
To put it another way, one is not born but becomes “white” (apologies to Simone de Beauvoir). The impossible demand is to unlearn that becoming and become “something other than what we are,” as the artist Claire Fontaine has it.
That time Baldwin named was then, but it is also now, long ago and not so long ago. As they had it in Paris during May 1968, “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible.” Ending micro-liberalism means setting aside the assertion that incremental micro-gains are all that can be achieved.
Judith Butler speaking at Occupy Washington Square Park, 2011.
Some of those reading may remember the philosopher Judith Butler coming to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, a visit I helped organize, and again calling for “impossible demands.” Looking at them now, the demands don’t mention white supremacy or racism. That’s as much Occupy’s fault as Butler’s. She addressed what seemed to be Occupy’s economic agenda.
Angela Davis visited the week after and told us that our task was to connect to the movement against mass incarceration. There was a collective (white) sense that we—the white occupiers—didn’t (yet) know how to do that. Davis had told us, though. Quoting Audre Lorde from “The Master’s House,” she shared:
“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
Demanding that we decolonize, Davis passed on the Oakland Commune’s call for a general strike.
Angela Davis at Occupy Washington Square Park, 2011.
Abolition. General strike. The anti-colonial imagination. These continue to be the watchwords of White Sight. Now I get to use them in a political and cultural context where they resonate widely, thanks to the work of so many activists, artists, scholars and writers. Davis herself said that she had not expected to see abolition be so central in her lifetime.
My book—like all books—is not simply “my” work. It became what it is because of dynamic interactions in the autonomous online learning spaces that arose during the pandemic, especially Testing Assembly and the Center for Creative Research and Autonomy. Testing Assembly in particular brought together many people who had been involved with Occupy via the activist space 16 Beaver, now closed.
Acknowledged
That said, the book is under my name and one of its key methods is acknowledgement. I acknowledge my own complicities and engagements, disavowals and refusals of and with whiteness and white masculinity.
To begin at the beginning, I acknowledge being a person clearly identified as white in the United States. In the United Kingdom where I grew up, I was identified as not-Black but not fully English. My last name and being visibly Jewish disqualified me at once.
This particularly English situation is one that Black British scholar Hazel Carby calls “The Question!” The question is often: “where are you really from?” It recently surfaced at a Buckingham Palace reception. In whatever form, it demands an answer, sometimes under threat of violence, real or symbolic.
In British cultural studies, identity became something that was worked towards, creating what Stuart Hall called an “unfinished conversation.” In John Akomfrah’s elegiac film of that title, Hall joked that when he asked people where they’re from, “I expect a very long answer.” If whiteness is a place, this book is my response to that question.
I’ve already been asked whether there are any redeeming characteristics to whiteness. My response is that the gift within the impossible demand that whiteness be abolished is no longer having to be white. At that point, you can rediscover a much more complex, nuanced and relational way of becoming. In racist ways of seeing, Hall was Black and I am white. In the unfinished conversation, he was partly “Portugese” (which is to say, Sephardi) Jewish. And so am I. And from there, we talk.