"The Week in White Sight" Part II
Dear friends: I want to thank you so much for kindly subscribing to this newsletter and reading its many installments to date. The last three posts seem to mark a caesura in the project. All three commemorated difficult anniversaries—the Nakba, the Central Park Birdwatching incident, and the George Floyd Uprising. The 75 year long Palestinian struggle can inform the 2020 movement that three years isn’t so long.
The goal of this newsletter was in part to raise awareness of my book. Six months after publication with the first reviews out, that’s as done as it’s going to get. As urgent as all our issues remain, I think it’s time to step down a notch. I will continue to send newsletters as generated by issues rather than by the calendar. If things get hot as they did in 2020, that might be daily. More likely, every couple of weeks.
I’m also going to stop posting across social media because I suspect the people that see those posts are you, who are already getting the newsletter! Social media isn’t very social any more and Substack’s stats show that no-one is finding their way here from Facebook, let alone Twitter.
All this said, the issues remain as urgent as ever, perhaps more so in the face of what can seem like a cumulative resignation to the rise of the far-right. In the war of maneuver that is playing out, what people do makes a difference.
The General Crisis of Whiteness
In short, the general crisis of whiteness continues. It has turned increasingly to preemptive violence, from Proud Boys assaulting LGBTQ+ activists in California to the murder of a Black woman through a closed door and the funding of Cop City in Atlanta.
To that end, for those who may not have seen, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a long interview with me by Natasha Lennard under this title. Tash is a comrade from Occupy days, who has become one of our leading radical writers and journalists. Check out her book Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, if you didn’t already.
Some highlights from the interview: a revised definition of white sight, as I have come to phrase it in public events and for teaching:
white sight is an operating system of what it is to make whiteness and white supremacy, which functions by connecting assumptions, contexts, learned experience, stereotypes, and techniques into a whole. And it has a long history. That history became fully visible in 2020 because of the actions that people took [in the form of the George Floyd uprisings]. And we’re still in that moment, which I call the general crisis of whiteness.
And with that:
White sight regulates bodies, land, and the relations between them by means of its capacity to survey colonized space, to claim it, and to place all forms of life under surveillance.
Here’s how the project got started in the first place:
In 2016, when people were campaigning for Donald Trump, there was a poster flying around from a far-right group called Identity Evropa with the head of the Apollo Belvedere statue on it saying, “OUR FUTURE BELONGS TO US.” The simple display of a classical statue to a white audience was intended to make them think: “Yes, I identify with that, that’s the European tradition to which I belong, I look like that.” That’s what we saw in Charlottesville [at the 2017 Unite the Right rally]. Charlottesville was the moment when I realized that this book was going to have to center around the sculpted white figure as the literal figure of whiteness and white sight. Because the far right gathered in very large numbers to defend a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. And when I saw someone get killed—[the antifascist counterprotester] Heather Heyer—deliberately murdered in the street over a statue, then I realized that this wasn’t just about representation; whiteness actually is a statue.
And here’s where I think we are now, as I mentioned last week, in the wake of the murmurations of 2020:
The murmuration shows how one could decenter “the” Human, moving away from 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 so on? It would create a different kind of collective cultural unconscious. If one looks at the history of murmuring as a word, it has always been about conspiracy and revolt. There’s always anxiety from elites that those who are under surveillance are murmuring among themselves, which indeed they are. And that might lead to some other formation. An old word for starling is “stare.” The murmuration of stares is a way of seeing beyond white sight—a collective way of seeing as something other than a single being.
I’ll have more to say about decentering the “human” and finding a sousreal alternative below the water. That’ll be next, when it’s ready.