Refuse Depression: Bird Politics, Shipping News and White Fragility TV
As I’ve been doing events, I often hear people say they feel (politically) “depressed.” Don’t be. It’s a right-wing tactic, manifested just today in the NY Times. The general crisis of whiteness continues, nonetheless. I’m hailing this week two notable wins, some wonderful new art and poetry that adds to our capacity to build on these issues, and just to keep it real, dissing some so-called “prestige” TV.
Taking Down
Audubon.
The Central Park bird-watching incident took place on the morning of the day that George Floyd was murdered, May 25, 2020. It was peak white sight: a white woman in financial services unable to see a Black birdwatcher as anything other than a “threat,” leading her to call the NYPD. Luckily, Christian Cooper, the birdwatcher, videoed the whole incident. The woman was fired, sued to claim she was dismissed because she is white, and lost.
Christian Cooper hasn’t stopped working. Last week the New York chapter of the Audubon Society, which supports birds and conservation, dropped the name of the racist ornithologist from their title, along with chapters in Chicago and Seattle. Even though the national organization retained the name, such unnaming is the next step of taking down monuments. It walks away from the history of “great men” to collective action.
Cooper, a board member in NYC commented:
The nation has changed, the demographic has changed — and yet, birding is overwhelmingly white. That’s not going to work if there’s going to be a constituency to fight for the birds so it goes directly to our mission.”
Certainly, the bird population of the settler colony continues to plummet, as it has since white settlement. Audubon contributed by killing all the birds he drew or purchasing dead birds in the markets of the day. He hoped that ornithology would restore the wealth he had enjoyed as a slaveowner and continued to espouse toxic racism towards Black and Indigenous people all his life. Good riddance!
Reparations from the Guardian newspaper
The Guardian is a British newspaper that has wide circulation in the US and elsewhere through its website and app. Although it is far from being a left periodical, its investigative journalism has often been important in recent years, notably in supporting Edward Snowden. Yesterday, it published findings showing that the paper, originally entitled the Manchester Guardian, had been founded on revenues from cotton woven in Manchester, grown by enslaved Africans in the United States. Furthermore, some of the founders had been slaveowners themselves.
This would not be surprising to anyone well versed in the recent history of slavery. As historian Walter Johnson has documented, 85% of cotton grown in the United States was exported to Britain. Plantation owners closely monitored market prices, extorting more labor when they went up. These details support the broad theses of Caribbean historians Eric Williams (1944) and CLR James (1938) on the relations between capitalism and slavery, which it took white history some sixty years to accept.
The Black British historian David Olusoga has had the grace to reveal that even he had not expected to make these findings, believing in the Guardian's radical identity, and falling prey to what he calls the “illusion” that slavery and empire are not central to everyday life in the UK, sustained by:
generations of historians who were equally determined to construct British history around the biographies of “great men” whose achievements, they believed, proved the nation’s supposed exceptionalism. The illusion is effective because we are all subconsciously schooled in it.
Those familiar with my work know what I’m going to say next: this history of “great men” was started by ultra-reactionary pro-slavery historian Thomas Carlyle in his 1840 lectures On Heroes and Hero Worship that gave us the word “visuality” in English. For Carlyle, visuality is the ability of the great man to see history as it happens, denied to everyone else.
It is, then, not just monuments that must fall. It is the racist, patriarchal way of seeing history as the product of “great men,” long marginalized in academic history but still central to the cultural unconscious of whiteness.
Birds and Ships
This week I received in the mail a book I have long anticipated: poet Nathaniel Mackey’s Birds Anonymous (support independent publishers and get one yourself!). I’m not enough of a poetry critic to engage with this amazing work: “a multiphasic, hectoring, and angelophanic rehearsal of vision and ‘all day music.’” It’s exhilarating to read, effortlessly making connections between the legendary 12th century Sufi classic The Conference of the Birds, Twitter and conference calls.
Here’s some associative links from my own thinking with birds as collective formation to reimagine social being:
All we knew was the birds
had
been debating for ages, no consensus or
conclusion had been reached.
—Nathaniel Mackey, “Telling It to the Birds”
The weapon of theory is a conference of the birds.
—Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, All Incomplete
The just person does not argue for their rights.
It is for others that they stand and fight.
—Attar, The Conference of Birds
***
Meanwhile, downtown at PPOW, Hew Locke has a stunning exhibit “Listening to the Land.” Centered around two beautifully made ships entitled The Survivor and The Relic—names I might well give myself— “this exhibit engages with contemporary and historical inequities while reflecting on the landscape and history of the Caribbean.” The title comes from Guyanese poet Martin Carter. In White Sight, I quote Carter’s 1974 speech to the University of Guyana, where he extolled “the riskers who go forward boldly to participate in the building of a free community of valid persons.” That’s the work since 2020, no more “great men,” but a free community of valid persons. Including birds. And ships—which were often home to some of the first such free communities, known to power as “pirates.”
In three paintings entitled Raw Materials, Locke evokes the dense layering of the visual field created by centuries of colonizing white sight and de-invisibilizes it. The sails of The Survivor are similarly rendered as a patchwork of fabric, painting, photographs, newspaper articles and colonial share certificates. Thirty years after Paul Gilroy’s foundational Black Atlantic, Locke shows the concept still has much to offer. His work embodies a free community in diaspora as defined by Stuart Hall:
Diasporas always maintain an open horizon towards the future. They are in that sense spaces of emergence. Because they are finally unpredictable, they are necessarily contingent.
The Stupidity of Succession
And just to show that I am not a cockeyed optimist, let’s note in passing how truly awful the HBO “prestige” vehicle Succession has become. Taking over from White Lotus, it seems that the Sunday 9pm slot should always be called “white wealth TV.” Who cares which of the Roys wins? In the week that Rupert Murdoch, the model for media mogul Logan Roy, married yet again, forcing us to see a photo of him naked to the waist, it’s not cute to care who wins a fake Fox News.
I could watch Succession when the point was to hate all of them. But if we are supposed to feel something for them? No. This is truly a show about nothing and in such shows, Larry David rightly says, “no hugging, no learning.” When it’s a show about white fragility at the billionaire level—with the supposed drama being whether Logan’s “six” billion was a smart offer compared to his children’s “ten”—then it’s a hard no.