by Ian Williams
On emboldened: When I used to read my mother’s poetry anthologies, I kept returning to Sylvia Plath, the most popular poet of the mid-century. I was always arrested by how casually she uses Black people for effect in “Ariel”:
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
To every challenge and agitation of Blackness, whiteness finds a way to respond, even if the response is only a performance. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Blackness responds with subversions and solutions to the agitations of whiteness, and whiteness in turn responds with craftier strategies. But whiteness is the chicken in all of this. The chicken dies before the egg.
Adaptability is among the most important attributes of our age because the rate of change is so steep. Travel agencies and video stores disappear. Phones go from rotary to Touch-Tone to flip to touch screen, which get outdated, supposedly, every couple of years. In management jargon: an institution that is adaptable and responsive will be nimble enough to survive. When that institution is coupled with the power to determine the rate of change, it becomes virtually unstoppable.
6. WHITENESS CONTRADICTS ITSELF
Adaptability causes whiteness to sometimes find itself in an uncomfortable position. Its escape methods can resemble contortionist manoeuvres. It promises a 0 percent interest rate on credit purchases, but in the dizzying fine print you discover that 0 percent means 22 percent.
Intersectionality is used by people of colour to expose how multiple identities complicate one’s existence. But intersectionality functions in whiteness too. While the intersectional crossings of Blackness (+ gender, say) yield a decrease in opportunity, the intersectionality of whiteness (+ religion, say) yields increased opportunities at best and niche opportunities at worst. Powers merge. Few things are more formidable than the intersection of white patriarchy.
Whiteness can be misogynistic while protecting white women.
It can speak a dialect of Christianity in public while behaving unscrupulously in private.
Whiteness is not uniform. It will accept new groups of people for its own preservation. As noted under bullet point 1, whiteness exists as a cluster of ethnicities, not as a homogeneous, monolithic race the way Blacks outside Africa are perceived to be. Occasionally, a group is designated next in line to be white. I never remember who. Black people are not in the line at all.
Whiteness is lawless. Even though it makes laws, interprets them, changes them, executes and exports them, it positions itself above its laws. Its laws serve its interests. Look into freeports.
7. WHITENESS IS POWERFUL
We know how powerful something is from the ease with which it accomplishes its desires. Whiteness can do whatever it wants. To be fair, many white people can’t, but whiteness can.
Because whiteness permeates the state, because the state, in fact, is constructed on white supremacist ideologies, whiteness has the power to start wars, destroy entire countries, peoples, to take what doesn’t belong to it. Its kindergarten report card would say, “Whiteness is encouraged to regulate its emotions and behaviour. Whiteness is encouraged to share. Whiteness is encouraged to play nicely with the other children.”
It’s obvious that whiteness is powerful. The question is not so much whether whiteness is powerful but how powerful whiteness is.
Here’s a hypothetical situation. Something goes missing from your house. The white child points to the Black child. The Black child points to the white child. Whom do you believe? I reckon that, without even speaking, the white child already has the benefit of credibility. Whiteness bestows innocence or good motives on its subjects; when one is freed of consequence, one has the power to act in any way one chooses.
Whiteness is so powerful that it can distort reality. It bends even the information we take in first-hand, information we observe with our senses, into whatever it wants. The testimony of a white person is so powerful that it is taken above recorded evidence. I’m thinking about the killings of Black people recorded on phones, which, given to any sighted person, would be a clear indication of the unprovoked, unwarranted murder of a defenceless and non-threatening person but is easily controverted by the testimony given by white men. Imagine a time before these recordings. Imagine a time when there is no device present. Whiteness bends the physical reality of the world. That’s how powerful it is.
Whiteness can demonstrate its power through violence, but even in its weakest state its power outstrips others’. Some of the most egregious abuses of public trust occur when whiteness performs fragility. We observe this performance when a white woman calls the police to wrongfully accuse a Black person of law-breaking. The woman sobs into the phone, even though she was shouting at the Black person moments ago. She accesses the power of the state to support her, but really it’s her whiteness coursing through a system. Her whiteness recognizes the dispatcher’s and the officer’s collaboration with whiteness.
One can see the dynamic of familiarity at the office, where a white person can mobilize whiteness to their advantage. The white candidate reminds the white hiring manager of herself, but she finds that the Black candidate, leaning too heavily on her credentials, doesn’t quite fit, which is to say she doesn’t seem personable. She asks, Can you see yourself having a beer with her?
8. WHITENESS OPPRESSES
Oppression and power are related. Oppression is a means to secure and maintain power. Whiteness partners with other agents to oppress others.
Capitalism. Built on the labour of Black people, capitalism requires inequities to thrive.
Colonialism. Whiteness replicates itself. It understands others by making others into itself. To call whiteness meddlesome would be an understatement. It leaves countries worse than when it arrives. It extracts, dominates, confuses, then withdraws itself in an official capacity; that is, it withdraws from its responsibility, but it does not withdraw its influence. In present times, whiteness still likes to be everywhere, from inhabited Arctic regions like Alaska to tiny islands in the Pacific like Guam. America maintains over eight hundred military bases in foreign countries.
Slavery. What is slavery but the domination of one group by another? One group remains human; the other is turned into a machine for labour. Slavery separates the mind from the body, enervates the former and exhausts the latter, until both are destroyed.
Environmental plunder. In the name of enterprise, whiteness oppresses the natural environment, which is seemingly defenceless against human intrusion. Nature repays human plunder in its own time with natural consequences.
Science. The application of science is not neutral. For much too long, medical research has taken the white, male body as the unit of humanity.
Religion. Even the institution that professes the highest moral standard has been deployed by whiteness in the name of white supremacy and Black subjugation.
Education. Beyond granting access to prosperity, the educational system is a site of acculturation into social structures. The power of the white professoriate—who knows all and to whom one must relinquish alternative epistemologies—is a way of locating trust and knowledge in the white mind. If university rankings are to be trusted, you would believe that no intelligence remains untouched by whiteness.
Instead of oppression, my father uses the word domination. Domination holds whiteness accountable for its actions, while oppression comes closer to describing what it feels like to live among whiteness and its agents. It’s a slight difference, and simply a matter of point of view, but it’s a small victory of the human spirit that I feel more oppressed than dominated.
The contradictory nature of whiteness means it can be oppressive and democratic simultaneously. It is democratic in its ideals and oppressive in its actions, without much need to reconcile the two; that is, it does not need to aspire to its ideals or confess the true nature of its actions.
/> 9. WHITENESS TAKES OFFENCE
Whiteness is easily insulted. The whiteness police would correct easily insulted to sensitive. But sensitive deflects us from the brutality of whiteness.
The response to insult is defence and denial. To be literal, on the state level, whiteness defends itself militarily. On the level of discourse, it deploys arguments to justify its necessity, its history of progress, while ignoring how that progress was achieved and at whose expense. White supremacist literature is an extreme example of white apologia.
On an interpersonal level, it defends itself from personal complicity by deflecting racial activity to conservatives, to skinheads. Here’s how that might sound. In response to the discomfort of these ten characteristics, a white person could say, I’d never get away with saying such things about Blackness. (True, but white people “got away” with such anatomies for centuries.) I bet if he wrote about Blackness, it would be eulogistic. (Probably largely so, as a corrective to common misperceptions.) He’s writing about racists, not me. (Actually about a racist system that greases itself with us.)
And so we get into a spiral of perceived insult, defence from a position of victimization, and before you know it, the Black person is back in the troublemaker’s chair.
Whiteness is easily insulted by calls to accountability. It is appalled by calls for justice because ethics has never constrained its behaviour before. Why should it now? Denial may be outright or it may be a distortion. Whiteness wants paintings of itself or selfies run through a filter—anything but the mirror. To see itself without distortion is unbearable.
10. WHITENESS IS OBSESSED WITH BLACKNESS
Dr. Flint, the slaveholder of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, began sexually pursuing her when she was fifteen years old. Jacobs tried to free herself from his obsession—she fell in love, she ran away, she hid in her grandmother’s attic for seven years while her children grew up. Dr. Flint retaliated against her attempts at freedom. He built an isolated cabin for her (and for him to “visit”) in the woods. He sold her children. He cut her hair. He struck her. He tracked her down in New York and New England. Even his death did not stop his obsession. He vowed that Jacobs would never be free so long as he had descendants to own her. Whenever I teach Jacobs’s autobiography, students are astonished by her master’s obsession with her and her body. Why does he care so much?
Care.
The prevailing narrative is that whiteness is interested in the question of humankind. What is a human? Are all people human? But I’d contend that its obsession with Blackness does not lie in resolving the humanity of Black people but in the certainty of Black humanity and in exploiting it as a testing ground for the limits of human subjugation and endurance. What is the human capacity for debasement? With the persistent devaluation of Black life, whiteness asks, How much can another human lose? It asks, How much can I get away with?
The invisibility of whiteness—no, the blindness of whiteness—is so profound that whiteness relies on Blackness to understand itself. James Baldwin writes about the interaction between Blacks and whites as foundational to the American identity.
Defining the self in contrast to another entity is common. Teenagers differentiate their emerging preferences against their parents’. In Canada, the problem of national identity used to be acute, so we defined ourselves against Americans. We have health care. We are polite. Our universities are affordable. And if Canadians define ourselves against Americans, against white Americans who define themselves against Black Americans, then Canadians also require a stability of identity from Black people. Canadians are implicated in the condition of Black people in North America. We—Canadians, Americans, Blacks, whites, Indigenous peoples, as well as a host of ethnic peoples—share a continent. Our identities are historically entangled. The nervousness around this point causes white Canadians to situate themselves favourably in American history as, say, the Promised Land at the end of the Underground Railroad.
Definition by negation is problematic because it is relational. So, to wield some control over this process of identity formation, whiteness shapes all the things it does not want to be into Blackness. Whiteness is obsessed with its purity. More precisely, it protects its freedom to pick and choose which elements it absorbs. It plunders and absorbs features of Black creativity while refusing other parts. When I was in graduate school, Greg Tate published a book with a title that makes me smile to this day: Everything but the Burden (the subtitle is What White People Are Taking from Black Culture). Everything from fades to soul has been absorbed into the mainstream, and all of it is sold. And so Blackness enters the marketplace again. We buy ourselves as white people.
FOUR TO EIGHTEEN DAYS
1. MOVING
On the road again.
I’m moving again. I have thirty days to get out of my condo. So long, yoga pants of Vancouver. Hello again, toques of Toronto. That was corny. I’ve set up mail forwarding, cancelled my utilities, put my closet and bookcases on a diet. Am I forgetting anything? The moving company will get back to me with a firm pickup date. And then my furniture will mosey along the Trans-Canada Highway to country music.
I’m moving back to what people call home. Where’s home? is such a tired question for immigrants. We are supposed to feel caught between the rock where we were born and the hard place where we live. The rock and the hard place drift apart, pulling our legs in opposite directions until we rip ourselves in two. You are supposed to show sympathy for our displacement and feel a touch of envy for our exotic rock. We are supposed to lap up your sympathy and acquiesce to your ownership of the hard place.
True, I’ve moved around enough to make the question of home complicated. But I can make it simple for you. Home is where the money is. Where I work determines where I live. I’ve never had the luxury of choosing to live in a place while my bank account regenerates itself like a lizard’s tail.
Anyway, I am moving back, if not home. I’m supposed to feel like a circle. While packing my blender into a box, I recognize myself in a squeezed half lemon drying out on the counter. I have more thoughts than feelings, the most dominant of which is, Where next? I throw the lemon in the garbage.
* * *
—
When I told my friend Jean Claude that I had decided to take the job in Toronto, he asked why, and I said, You know.
No, I don’t, he said. Why?
The usual reasons.
Family?
No.
You’re tired of this job.
I love this job.
Then why? he asked again.
And I said, Money.
Vancouver said they’d match the money.
Yeah, but Toronto would match the money plus more.
A smile began on his face. Oh, I get it.
I smiled back. It’s pretty obvious, right?
Right, he said. You’re a money whore.
* * *
—
Yo, I been poor. And my parents grew up poorer. Money is not negligible when at every juncture your opportunities are determined by family money. A plant’s roots grow to the size of its pot. In my most lamentable moments, I bemoan how my potential was stunted by childhood constraints. I wanted to play violin, I wanted to swim, I wanted other encyclopedia sets, I wanted a microscope, I wanted to study abroad. I wanted so many things that most parents would gladly give their child if they could afford it. I wasn’t asking for a Nintendo and ball shoes.
My parents, like so many immigrants in the script, did their best. No violin, but piano lessons from the church organist. For books, family trips to the library. For art and languages and everything else, there were Canadian public schools and domestic tuition. They signed all the forms I brought them.
I like ze croissant and ze baguette, huh-huh.
One of the perks of this new job in Toronto is that I get a research le
ave after one year of work. I’ve worked fifteen years without a sabbatical. To put that in perspective, professors get a sabbatical every seven years, meaning I’m twice overdue.
I’m thinking about moving to France. I know I haven’t even moved to Toronto yet, so this restlessness is premature. Hear me out. I have no ties in France, meaning I could live anywhere, not just Paris or Marseilles. I could buy a super-cheap place somewhere secluded, a hamlet overlooking a field. I’d be the only living thing in the house. There’d be arched mouse holes in the baseboard but no mice. I would make myself into the ogre of the hamlet.
The French hamlet idea actually started with research into a character. He’s a developer whose interests took me to a number of real estate sites, and before I knew it, I couldn’t distinguish the character’s interests from my own. That character’s name is Beckett.
Samuel Beckett moved to France. James Joyce did as well. Gertrude Stein. Henry James, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell. All these anglophones left their familiar countries behind and moved to France. Beckett went so far as to write in French.
Black people have long found creative liberation in France. There’s James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone. At the end of Between the World and Me, Coates seems most free when he writes about the French and their salmon pants and the bright sweaters tied around their necks. All my visits to France have been without incident. My first time was pretty white, except for the day my friend and I emerged from the metro near Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre to a dazzling community of Blackness. Hairstylists, money transfer services, yellows and greens, head wraps. I saw more Black people there than I had seen during my whole trip.
