The Depression of White Succession
Three years to the day after the Minnesota National Guard tried to suppress the George Floyd Uprising, HBO aired the finale of Succession, its Anglo-American fantasy saga of racial capitalism. There was little public reflection on the Uprising from white-identified people, while Succession received endless analysis.
Succession’s fascination with capitalism was matched only by its disregard of its unrelieved whiteness. As an Anglo-American white person working in a media studies program, I’m going to use Succession as a lens with which to gauge where we are now.
Shouldn’t I be addressing police violence, like the chaos in Paterson NJ, or anti-Black violence, such as that directed at Jordan Neely? I’m following the guidelines of BLM here. Black activists should set the agenda where Black lives are concerned, whereas the responsibility of white people is to unbuild white supremacy.
Cut to White
One of the ways white supremacy is sustained is by being unnoticed or blanked. Rarely in all the response to Succession did I even see the words “white” or “whiteness.” After all, the show itself never raised its wall-to-wall whiteness as an issue. While making gestures to the misogyny of racial capital, Succession took its white supremacy for granted, even as it offered abuse as its “explanation” for the family pathology.
In the finale, only one named Black character spoke, Board member Sonya, who says “Yes” to support the motion to sell. An unnamed extra later offered “Congratulations” to the winner, Tom. Some faces in the crowd. And that was it. For a series that aimed to be a mirror to the Trump administration in general, and used street protests modeled on those of 2020 as a plot device in particular, this silence spoke volumes.
Succession ended with a formal cut to black. Brought down by his sister’s vote, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) had failed to win the prize. He sat staring blankly out into New York Harbor at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Cut to black. Or more exactly, a cut below elite white.
Kendall’s father Logan (Brian Cox) had immigrated from Scotland via Canada. As an Irish-American, Logan became white, or at least what supremacy calls a “white ethnic.” There’s a pun in the name Roy, homophone to the French roi, or king. Kendall lost his father’s “empire,” as the show called it, to the Swedes, top-ranked Nordic whiteness personified. For all his extravagant wealth, Kendall’s demotion within the imagined hierarchies of whiteness undercut his version of white reality.
The cut was a replay of another famous series finale, that of The Sopranos in 2007. Fans continue to debate whether the cut to black meant that Tony was killed, or if, as film scholar Dana Polan put it, the fiction just ended.
By contrast, Succession wanted its viewers to feel grand emotion. At the very last, the fraught score drops away and Kendall is left in silence. “Tragedy,” director Mark Mylod called it. George Floyd was murdered on suspicion of using a fake $20 bill, while Kendall was bought out for billions. The “tragedy” here is that, while racial capitalism promises self-actualization to those at the top of its racial hierarchy, it is an illusion, a fetish like any other mode of commodification.
It’s not a classical tragedy because there is no catharsis, no cleaning of the self produced by experiencing the failures of the Roys—Roy the King is not the equivalent of Oedipus the King. Nor is their disenchantment with racial capital in any way to be equated with the violence of anti-Blackness. What it can offer is insight into the personal and collective gain, for those now identified as white, were whiteness to be abolished.
We Are Nothing
The signature moment in this regard came after the three siblings had fought—literally—over how Shiv would vote. Shiv (Sarah Snook) opted to destroy Kendall having herself been pushed out of contention by the patriarchy. While she gives the excellent reason that Kendall had killed someone, her smirk of defiant pleasure undoes her moral superiority.
The death in question was that of Andrew Dodds, a waiter taking Kendall to score drugs at a family wedding in Scotland. Their vehicle ends up in the water. Kendall gets out but the waiter doesn’t and he blames himself. Logan Roy later dismissed the moment, saying “no real person involved.”
Consciously or not, Logan was paraphrasing the expression “NHI” (No Human Involved) used by LAPD to describe cases involving Black or Brown Angelenxs. For Logan Roy, whiteness is a hierarchy that combines class with patriarchy and race to make kings. No waiter could be what Logan took to be elite white. In the concluding irony, nor could Kendall. Or anyone. Even Logan had no better friend than his paid bodyguard.
Back in the finale, now that tables are turned, Roman (Kieran Culkin) sits on the actual table and definitively observes:
We are bullshit. You are bullshit! You're fucking bullshit, man! I'm fucking bullshit She's bullshit. It's all fucking nothing, man. I'm telling you this because I know it, okay? We're nothing. Okay. Okay.
It’s Samuel Beckett, via method acting, 2023 style. At one level, Rome—even his name is the epitome of whiteness—means the three Roy children. They are not kings, they are just Rosencrantzs and Guildensterns.
Another way to hear it is that the “we” who are nothing are all white people. That there is no hierarchy making whiteness into a something. That all the resulting violence and aggression to try and make whiteness into a reality produces only a deep-seated depression that renders us into nothing.
The Abuse of Power Is The Power of Abuse
That nihilism is not clinical or philosophical, but the learned response to sustained abuse, whether physical or “sexual.” The Roy children are Catholics and undoubtedly went to private schools, so they never stood a chance. In addition, they had a violent, withholding father, as the entire series made clear. Don’t forget their mother Lady Caroline (Harriet Walter), whose withholding extends even to food in the English manner.
Succession didn’t draw the parallel to actual experience too closely here. To keep audiences in awe of elites, to make the wonder at the mystery of the king, it’s best not to dwell on the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and “Prince” Andrew. Yet even this week, we are still learning how pervasive such abuse has been. In Illinois, the Attorney General’s investigation revealed this week:
1,997 survivors… were sexually abused by the 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers.
These figures are four times greater than those admitted to by the Catholic Church just five years ago.
In Britain, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse chaired by Professor Alexis Kay reported in October 2022 that :
In March 2020, the Office for National Statistics estimated that 3.1 million adults in England and Wales had experienced sexual abuse before the age of 16.
That’s 5% of the population. The price paid for such systemic abuse remains low. Last week, the UK government issued its response to the report, widely found “insulting” and “inadequate.” Even these low level actions came without a timeline and were “vague and unspecific.” Perhaps that’s connected to the fact that no less than 56 Members of Parliament are currently under (slow, gentle) investigation for sexual misconduct, including three cabinet ministers.
In the media world, the New York Times today reports how the Financial Times wouldn’t publish a story describing how the activist Guardian, paid off one of its own elite journalists accused of serial sexual harassment. And so on, and on.
Succession finally revealed the extent of Logan’s own abuse at his funeral. But it made no serious attempt to explore how it impacted him or his children. Often media commentary called the Roy children’s issues “Oedipal,” missing as ever what’s in plain sight—the power of abuse.
In the US, the failure to hold abusers accountable has had the paradoxical consequence that far-right conspiracy groups like QAnon have been able to co-opt the issue. Its absurd claims might seem less incredible to those who have seen churches, schools, hospitals and other supposedly decent institutions involved in abuse. That’s not to justify QAnon, needless to say.
To Become Something
What would it be to try and become something other than nothing? Whenever I give a presentation on this work, I can feel a certain anxiety in the room from white people. Am I going to make them feel guilty? I have usually responded as above, by reminding us of the responsibility we took on in 2020 to unbuild white supremacy. 2020 showed us that there is already a majority available to work with. It’s not necessary to win over the haters, only to reaffirm that majority and work democratically.
That’s still something of an “eat your vegetables” mandate, I know. Recently, I read Maggie Nelson’s long book On Freedom. Although I don’t much care for the book, Nelson takes as her cue David Graeber’s axiom that we should live as if we are free. That implies that the decision to unbuild white sight and white supremacy would be a freedom. Those incarcerated or in other situations of institutional constraint don’t have such freedom.
The practice of freedom begins with consent, the active engagement in certain forms of action. Unfreedom begins with the diminishing or reduction of consent. Sexuality and gender identity have, for reasons set out by Foucault and many others, become key zones for the expression of consent. Fascism sees the restraint of such consent as its forward march.
“Consent not to be a single being.” Join the murmuration. It will have to be protective and defensive against the fascist hawks, yes. There will be movement, some of which, I’m afraid, will be more marches. But it’s not nothing, and that’s something.
The murmuration shows how one could decenter “the” Human, moving awayf rom what philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls “monohumanism,” the idea that whiteness is the one way to be human. Instead of adding everybody into this exclusionary category, “the” Human, why not try to understand human life in relation to animal and other-than-human life—spirits, ancestors, and more? That would a succession worth attending.
Bravo, Nick! Thank you for this. I’m happy to have found you again beyond J6 social media enablers